


although we are faithless

by noviembre



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fix-It, Heaven, M/M, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Post-Season/Series 15, The Empty (Supernatural), canon compliant (derogatory), something is rotten in the state of Supernatural's Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28587036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noviembre/pseuds/noviembre
Summary: Dean is driving. Driving down a long road with Sam, and his parents are at the end of the road, and his mom made pie, and it's everything he dreamed about when he was a kid. Everything is okay. Everything is fine.Except it doesn't make sense, and something is missing.Something is broken here--Dean is driving again.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 55
Kudos: 235





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it is a given that the finale was terrible but I couldn't stop thinking about how to explain the out-of-character weirdness of Dean's heaven within actual canon (the show is about found family!!! i scream into the void). i wanted to process the whole thing to make my peace with it, resolve all the open plot lines from the season and, mostly, make dean talk about his feelings.

Dean is driving. 

Sam, beside him, is smiling — they don’t know where they’re heading, but it’s okay. Everything is okay here in Heaven. Dean is content. 

_Carry on my wayward son_ , the tape deck sings. The Impala handles smooth as butter as he takes another curve in the road, squinting against the golden sunlight down the tree-lined highway in the distance. It’s heaven, so it’s not anywhere, but he’s reminded of Montana, the drive up to Rufus’s cabin. 

As soon as the thought of Rufus occurs to him, he remembers there are other people here. Bobby told him — right, all the people he loves are here now. Dean thinks he must have been so blissed out on the heaven vibes, on getting his brother back, because how could he forget how many other people he has to see? He gets to see his family again, and that’s the best part of all this. 

He’s barely formed the conscious thought of _I want to see my family_ when a clearing in the trees comes into view up ahead on the right. He glances over at Sam, catching his eye and nodding up at the clearing. 

“Looks like we’ve got more family reunions on the agenda,” Dean tells him, pulling off the blacktop onto the dirt road leading up to a house, tucked back in the trees. 

The paint is peeling just a bit, making it look comfortable and lived-in, and Dean spies movement in the shade of the wraparound porch. 

It’s Mary’s voice they hear first as they shut the doors to the Impala. 

“Welcome home, boys,” she greets them, stepping out onto the path up to the porch, neat in her dress and apron, long hair gleaming in the sun. She looks like home, like all the childhood memories and dreams Dean spun up over the years. 

Long hair— Dean’s thoughts snag, just for a second, but it’s gone before he can catch it. He shakes his head — must be unimportant. He’s in Heaven, after all. Everything is okay here. 

“Mom,” he’s saying before he realizes, and he steps forward to embrace her. She smells like homemade pie crust warm from the oven, like she used to make. Except she was a terrible cook, wasn’t she? Didn’t she tell him once that she’d just heat up pie from the store—

That can’t be right.

The thought is jarring, uncomfortable and his brain is eager to let it go —

Let what go?

His mom smells like pie crust, and he hugs her tightly, and it’s all okay. 

Sam is close behind him, boots crunching lightly on the dirt path. And Dean’s turning to him, turning with a wide grin, which is why he’s looking straight at Sam when he hears his Dad’s voice.

“Are those my sons I hear?” John Winchester booms, voice warm, from within the shadows of the wraparound porch. 

And Dean, looking straight at Sam, sees Sam’s eyes go narrow and his jaw clench, just for a split second. The next moment, his face smooths out, returning to that beatific contentment he’s been wearing since Dean first saw him on the bridge. 

It’s so fast that Dean wants to think he imagined it, the sudden look of tension on Sam’s face — something in him says _let it go_. 

But Sam — Sam had been unhappy. Just for a second, but Dean’s deepest instincts are attuned to Sam’s happiness, and he can’t let the image slide out of his head. 

“Sam?” Dean asks. “You good?”

“I’m fine, Dean,” Sam tells him, smiling. “I’m better than fine. I’ve got my whole family here, don’t I?”

And something about that doesn’t quite sound right, but Sam is smiling, and Mary is smiling, and John, stepping up to lean against the porch railing with a glass of lemonade in hand, is smiling.

Everything is okay.

They’re sitting on the porch now. Mary’s telling them that the pie has to cool, and Dean’s joking that he’s going to sneak in and get to it before anyone else can, and they laugh together, as a family. 

“Dean,” his dad says, and Dean, on instinct, feels his spine straighten up against the wicker back of the chair, on instinct. Muscle memory. “You taking good care of that car?”

And his voice is friendly, warm, fatherly, so it doesn’t make sense the way that Dean’s hand tightens on the arm of the chair as he replies, “Yessir.” 

Doesn’t make sense the way that tension threads through his body, the way his pulse beats faster in his wrists. 

“You want to hear the rundown of the latest repairs I’ve made?” He nods out at where she’s parked, gleaming in the light. It’s a natural offer. It’s no big deal. Everything is okay. Why does he feel like he’s on a tightrope?

The condensation from the lemonade leaves a damp ring on his jeans where he’s resting it. 

He breathes in, and the tension starts to slip away. It’s so much easier to be calm, to let the warm afternoon air and the smell of pie drifting out from the kitchen lull him into a state of contentment. _Relax,_ he tells himself.

He turns to look straight-on at his father, who’s saying how much he’d love to open the hood of the Impala and check out what Dean’s done, but he trusts Dean’s done an excellent job caring for her. 

Except — his eyes catch on Sam, on John’s other side. He’s frowning.

Why is Sam frowning?

“This—” Sam starts, sounding confused. 

John turns, smile lines creased in his face. “What, son?” he asks, kindly.

Sam meets Dean’s eyes and something like fear flickers across his face. 

It’s _wrong_ , it’s out of place, and for a brief moment everything else feels unreal next to the sharpness of the look in Sam’s eyes. It tethers him, and just for a split second one thought forms brightly in his head: _this isn’t right_. 

“Pie’s ready!” Mary sings out. 

The sound startles him enough that he looks away from Sam, glances up at her. She looks happy, and Dean’s happy to be with her, and — he loses the thread of what he was thinking about. 

It must not have been important, anyway. They’re all together here, and happy, and everything is okay.

The pie is delicious, flaky and sweet and just a shade more perfect than it ever was on earth. 

Dean’s scraped up the last bits of cherry juice, licking his finger unabashedly as he stands to collect the plates. Mary murmurs her thanks and Sam, absentmindedly, touches the tips of his fingers to his chin and pulls them away, an intentional gesture, as Dean takes his plate.

There’s a moment where everything is still. Dean stares at Sam’s hand. It’s familiar, deep in Dean’s bones, but it’s dissonant here. Jarring, in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Sam glances up at him, eyes wide and startled. “I don’t know — why did I do that?” he says. Something like a headache pulses at Dean’s temples — like he’s on a hunt, staring at a coroner’s report that just doesn’t make sense. 

“Dean? Sam?” his dad says, and the feeling of wrongness intensifies. He stumbles backwards into the house, needing a moment alone suddenly just to shake off the prickles on his skin. 

It’s quiet in the kitchen as he leaves the plates in the sink and braces his hands on the counter for a moment. _Everything is okay_ , something tells him, and he wants to believe it — wants to let the feeling fade. 

Dean turns around, breathing out slowly — and something catches his eye. Mary’s apron, tossed over the back of a kitchen stool. It’s fallen open and a handprint left in flour, where she must have brushed her hand off, glows red-gold in the light of the long sunset. 

_A handprint—_

There’s something important, he feels it, but it’s like waking up from a dream and trying to remember the details. 

His brain is so tired, and it would be so much easier to just let it go, but he grits his teeth. There’s something — someone important.

He sees the handprint again, and a phantom burn ghosts over his shoulder, and just for a second he sees a face —

Dean is driving. 

He thinks — was I doing something else? There’s a sense like deja vu, and he squints against the sunlight. But the thoughts are slippery and it’s easier to let them go; lean back against the Impala’s seat and punch the gas a bit harder.

Sam, beside him, hums thoughtfully, but when Dean looks over at him he’s got a content look on his face.

_Carry on my wayward son_ , the tape deck sings. 

“Do you think— the people we love. Do you think they’re here?” Sam asks, after a time, and the trees part ahead as if summoned by his words to reveal a two story house off on the side of the road.

Their parents are waiting for them when Dean shuts off the engine. And it’s good — that’s their family, of course that’s who would be waiting. Dean shakes his head against the split second of confusion, not sure why something felt wrong — why he expected someone else.

Sam hesitates on the door handle for a second.

They step out of the car, and the warmth of the sunlight on his face dispels whatever momentary weirdness he was feeling.

Over the car, Sam glances up at their parents, grins wide at Dean. “Can’t wait to introduce Mom—” his mouth snaps shut abruptly.

“Introduce Mom to who?” Dean asks, because it’s out of place — there are just the four of them here, the family, and who else could be missing? 

Sam looks lost. “I don’t… Dean, I don’t know who.” He rubs at his finger — at the third finger on his left hand — 

Dean is driving.

_Carry on my wayward son_ , the tape deck sings. 

“Sam—” he says, urgent. “What were we talking about? Just now?” He knows there’s something there, like a dream slipping away from him, but he can’t let it escape. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam looks as frantic as Dean feels. “Our family—”

A house appears in a clearing of trees up ahead. Dean slams on the brakes. 

He can’t quite grasp it but deep down, the hunter’s instinct in his gut is telling him there’s something wrong there.

“Dean — you feel it too, right? We’re forgetting something.”

“I feel it.” He braces his hands on the wheel, staring ahead. There was something important. Something he realized. A glass of lemonade— long hair glinting in the sunlight— a handprint—

His head aches.

“We’ve been here before,” Sam is saying, in a rush like he did when he was trying to piece details together on a case. “That house up there. Can you feel it? We’re in a loop. I know what’s there—”

“Our parents,” Dean says, “but something wasn’t right. Mom made pie—” As he says the words out loud, it’s easier to remember, like the details become more solid when he says them. He can see the porch now, taste the pie, remember the feeling of wrongness when Mary said she’d baked. “Sam, tell me everything you remember. Out loud.” 

Sam is nodding, like he came to the same realization. “We saw Mom and Dad, but it wasn’t like they ever really were. Dad was,” he snorts, “man, he was way too nice. Not like he ever really was in life. He said he trusted you with the car.” 

“And Mom,” Dean tightens his fingers against the steering wheel. “I have memories— it’s hard to pin down, but I remember her, and the pie-baking housewife act just doesn’t fit. She was a badass, I think, but — why is it so hard to remember?”

“I don’t know.” Sam’s shaking his head. “I feel like there’s something blocking my memories of life, like I can only remember the outlines of things. I remember you, obviously, but if I try to focus on details, things get blurry. They slip away.”

The memory comes back to Dean, then, of when he’d first arrived in Heaven. It’s not a fight to recover, like his memories from earth, but it feels distant and he wonders, with his stomach dropping, how long they’ve been caught in this loop. 

“When I got here, I saw Bobby,” he says, remembering. “He told me— he said that Heaven had been changed, that it was different now. He said—” the name catches on his tongue, for just a second, before he can finish. “He said Jack changed things.” 

_Jack._ Dean clenches his jaw around a sudden wave of emotion, _pride-guilt-love_ knotted tightly in the pit of his stomach. And there’s something else he’s missing, he can feel it, but his head pulses painfully when he tries to focus. 

Sam’s eyes go wide as Dean says the name. “Dean, I… how did I forget Jack?” 

“They’re messing with us,” Dean says, anger building. “Whatever they told me, about things being different here? It’s a lie, man. Hell, I bet that wasn’t even Bobby talking.” 

What is it that he can’t remember? There was something in that interaction — something that was snatched out of his memory. He remembers Bobby — they had a beer — he said Jack fixed things — Dean saw the car —

No.

In the middle there, there’s a skip, like a tiny record scratch. 

He was looking at Bobby, then he turned to see the car, and —

Dean is driving.

_Carry on my wayward son_ , the tape deck sings.

“Son of a _bitch_!”

He slams on the brakes. He was so _close_ , to something — why can’t he remember what’s burning at the edges of his memory.

“Dean, quick, listen — before it fades,” Sam’s saying, ever the smart one. “Something’s wrong here. Our memories are being messed with. We’ve seen our parents, but they’re not right — it’s some kind of fake version. You saw Bobby and he mentioned—”

“Jack,” Dean says, mind catching on the name, and Sam inhales sharply and leans quickly to unlatch the glove compartment. 

“Come on, come on,” he murmurs, digging past the box of fake IDs and a pile of takeout napkins. “Here we go!” he says, triumphant, pulling out an old ballpoint pen. As Dean watches, he uncaps the pen with his teeth, pushing up the sleeve of his hoodie. On his forearm, in neat capital letters, he prints _JACK_ and then _BOBBY._

“Smart, Sammy,” Dean whistles, taking the pen and following Sam’s lead. After a moment he writes along the length of his forearm: _You’re caught in a loop. Something is wrong._

At Sam’s look, he shrugs a bit. “If I stop concentrating on all the things that seem weird, it’s like there’s this pressure to think everything is okay. I don’t want to get caught off-guard.”

“Okay, so the things that have seemed weird,” Sam prompts. 

“Mom and Dad being all perfect Stepford couple,” Dean offers. “And she really couldn’t bake for shit. The whole pie thing doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s more like we’re trapped in a dream than a memory, I guess,” Sam says. “Is that how heaven’s changed?”

Dean shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know, man. Don’t get me wrong, I would be friggin’ ecstatic to see Mom and Dad again, but— that dream? About our family being together and perfect like that? It’s an old one, something I’d have focused on when I was younger, like when you were away at Stanford.” 

He’s been thinking that this time loop is malicious, some new big bad showing up to screw with them, but now— it occurs to him that maybe this is more a symptom of something being wrong with Heaven. _If they’re even in Heaven at all_ , a dark voice in his mind says. 

“There was something, when we got out of the car — I don’t know how many loops ago it was— but I remember getting a sense of something being _wrong.”_

“That’s right,” Dean remembers slowly, the memory coming back through a fog. “You said something about introducing Mom to someone? But then it faded.”

Sam’s eyes go wide. “Eileen, oh god,” he gasps. His face goes slack, shocked, and Dean has a split second of fear that something’s wrong with Sam before the name registers and the knowledge slams back into him like a rush of cold water. 

_Eileen, of course — fierce and funny and tough —_ he can see her smile clearly, like the fog’s been lifted just as Sam found her name. 

Dean swallows hard as the fast-forward recap of all the times he met Eileen, hunted with her, watched Sam give her big moon-eyes fades away. Sam’s still out of it, emotions flickering across his face too fast for Dean to read, and he guesses Sam must have a lot more memories to process. 

And he realizes, suddenly, he doesn’t know anything of Sam’s life after Dean died. With newfound clarity, it occurs to him that Sam might have — hopefully, _did_ have — a whole life, a family, without him. After he was gone. And it’s everything he ever wanted for Sam, of course it is, but he’d be lying if he pretended there wasn’t a bitter twist to his stomach regardless as he inks _EILEEN_ under the names already on his arm. 

He doesn’t say any of what he’s thinking, just presses the ballpoint pen back in Sam’s hand. “Give me a second,” he says, though Sam’s still got the blue-screen-of-death look going on, and steps out of the car.

In the quiet of the empty road, he runs a hand through his hair and looks up at the fake sky of Heaven. 

With some of his memories from Earth coming through more clearly, he can start to see the holes. There are people, he’s sure of it — he doesn’t know their names yet, can’t see their faces, but he knows there are people that should be here. People who mattered. Family.

And there’s something huge, still. 

When he was little, before the fire, he had a picture book of the solar system, one of those full-color books for kids full of images and facts about the planets. The full middle spread showed the size of the planets relative to the sun — its scale so massive, so overwhelming that only part of it could even fit on the page. Of all things, that’s what’s stuck in his head right now — that sense that there is something missing so important, so massive that he can’t even see how far it extends. 

His head pounds. But he pushes, again, through the fog. He can’t let this go. 

The highway is silent around him, like it’s waiting — like something is holding its breath — and he’s reminded again of Montana. Of catching a glimpse of something moving in the rearview mirror — seeing a ghost walking down the highway, disappearing before he could find it. 

In his mind sees that handprint again, ghosted in flour.

Not a ghost. 

_Cas—_

The name is in his mind suddenly, clear as a bell. He can’t forget it — can’t lose this again — and he says it loud, urgent. “Cas— Cas—”

He remembers. Blue eyes _gripped you tight_

best friend 

_i need you_

_the one thing i want_

_you changed me, dean—_

And it’s too much, God, 12 years of memories slamming into him, leaving him breathless. 

When he comes back to himself again, he’s on the ground, leaning up against the Impala where his knees must have given out. The gravel scrapes under his palms; his throat is dry, eyes embarrassingly hot. He’s never felt so complete. 

“Cas,” he chokes out again. “Castiel. I remember you.”

_I can’t lose this —_

He takes a sharp, unsteady breath, pulling himself to his feet and fumbling for the door handle. Sam looks over at him and his eyebrows shoot up. “Dude, you okay?”

“Pen,” Dean says, reaching. “Give me the pen back.” 

Sam doesn’t argue, just hands it over. 

On the underside of his wrist, where his pulse pounds through the veins that lie shallow under his skin, Dean writes _CAS._ He thinks, wildly, about writing it a hundred more times, up and down his arms, to drive away the fear of forgetting again. 

Sam, nosy as ever, leans over to see what he’s written, and inhales sharply as his own memories of Cas must hit him. 

Dean can only hope that, caught up in remembering, Sam doesn’t see the way he traces the letters on his wrist with the fingertips of his other hand. 

Prayer never came easy to him before he had something — someone — to believe in. Now it’s second nature to him:

_Cas,_ _I remember you. I’m not gonna forget you again. I’m gonna find you, okay? Hold on._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Searching for cracks in Heaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: dean's death is discussed here in a way that, while not actually implying suicidal ideation, does have a tone of dean having been unwilling to fight to stay alive. nothing in this is more severe than dean's canonical mental health struggles as portrayed on the show, but wanted to give a heads up if that's something you are sensitive to.

By mutual agreement, they decide to leave the car. It’s not that Dean wants to leave his baby behind — hell no — but they kept getting snapped back to the car every time a breakthrough was close. The way he figures it, whatever’s keeping them trapped here wants them in the car, on the road, driving, so whatever hope they have of breaking out of here, their best shot is in the other direction. 

It’s not like they have many options, though.

“Last time we were in Heaven,” Sam says, in a rush like the memory’s just coming back, “We had to follow the road. Do you remember?”

Dean looks ahead at the highway stretching out before them. It’s innocuous, smooth, gentle curves that the Impala would handle like a dream—

“Not this road,” he says, and his voice is harsh. Just looking at the road started to lull him into a trance. Now that he’s conscious of the way this place has been trying to keep them under, keep them happy like drugged-up pigs for slaughter, he can feel it pressing in on his skin — the need to be content, to think that everything is fine. He can’t let his guard down. Can’t let it steal away what he’s just got back.

He touches the names on his forearm again, makes sure he’s got the pen in his pocket. “Let’s get off the highway. Been a while since we went hiking, huh Sam?”

The trees lining the highway are dense, uninviting, and that’s what settles Dean’s resolve that it’s the right way to go. Whatever feels uncomfortable here is what he trusts. Stepping off the highway, broaching the tree line, feels the same as pushing on a bruise — painful in a way that reminds him it’s real, keeps the memory fresh. 

The trees and bramble aren’t so thick that he needs a machete, but it’s a lot denser than the forests in Purgatory, and it’s slow going. He pauses to squint upward at the way the sunlight filters through the treetops — the lessons on wilderness survival spring to his mind easily, drilled in a hundred times by John when he was, what, 9? Some messy combination of John’s army knowledge, book learning, and secondhand teaching from Bobby, Pastor Jim and the other hunters who’d been around the block before him. 

Of course, it’s not like the position of the sun in the sky actually tells him anything here. The sun isn’t real, they aren’t going in any particular direction — hell, he’s not even sure if “north” exists here.

Still, the sun is warm on his face where it’s dappled through the branches. 

Dust, caught in the beams of light, drift hazy in the air. There’s no destination, no place to be, just him and the trees and the sunlight. 

He’s content. Everything is okay.

The voice comes like it’s at a distance, like Dean is underwater, and he can’t process it — the sharpness in the tone so out of place and uncomfortable that he shakes his head, trying to brush it away like a buzzing fly.

“ _Dean!”_ he hears again, and it’s Sam’s voice — Sam, sounding distressed, which trips a wire in his deepest instincts, sends cold water rushing over him. 

Sam’s grabbing his arm, pulling it up so it’s stretched out level with Dean’s chest. “Look, Dean, remember we’re being screwed with here, don’t let them get your memories again—”

It takes a second to pull his eyes off the beams of light, focus on the ballpoint scratches on his arm. For a moment, the letters don’t make any kind of sense. Then his eyes refocus, sharpen on the words, and—

Christ. 

Something clenches hard in his chest. For a moment he can hardly breathe, and he braces his other hand up against a tree, gasping in air. 

He almost lost it, again. Almost lost the people he — goddamnit, he loves. Almost lost sight of who he is. Nausea comes over him in a brief wave and he swallows against the sour taste in his throat. It’s not like before, when he first remembered Jack, and Eileen, and Cas, _Cas,_ when the memories came pure and overwhelming and drowned him. It’s all still there, right at his fingertips, but he’d gotten distracted just for a half a second and it had almost slipped away — 

The precariousness of their situation really sets in, then. 

Whatever force, or spell, or whatever it is, that’s keeping them from accessing their memories — that wants them limited to the barest fiction of the people they were on earth — it’s not going to stop. It’s always going to be there, just waiting for him to take a wrong step, get distracted just for a moment, and then it’s going to sweep in and steal everything from him. 

He clenches his jaw against the idea. 

Another lesson from John Winchester he learned early: how to turn despair into anger; how to let it sharpen your mind and steady your hand and fix your enemy in your vision. He does that now — steels himself hard against the idea of loss, and lets himself get truly righteously _pissed_ at whatever is doing this to them. 

Bitterness is an ugly feeling, and it’s something he can grip onto, dig his heels into against this slippery charade of contentment that’s pressing in on him. 

Sam must see something in his face, in the set of his jaw, because he stops making worried noises when Dean looks up to meet his gaze.

“I’m fine, Sam, I got it back. That was too fuckin’ close, though.” He looks down, just for a second, at his arm again. Touches his other thumb, light as he can for fear of smearing the ink, for a half second to the three letters inked over his veins. 

He lets everything he’s feeling become anger, because anger is focus and focus is what’s going to get them out of this nightmare. 

Sam, in the corner of his eye, nods slowly. 

“Do you remember when we worked that case in Oklahoma, where there were all those cartoon deaths?” he asks.

“Yeah?” Dean says, confused at the non sequitur. “With Fred Jones, I remember it.”

“I think it might have been the first case Cas worked with us. Worked properly, I mean, not as an angel but just as a hunter.” Sam starts moving, again, but he stays closer to Dean now — tight in his peripheral vision. 

“It was right after I — after we got him back. After Purgatory,” Dean fills in, still not sure where this is going.

“Right, so he was still a little loopy. Anyway, so do you remember when we were at the nursing home, trying to get answers from the residents who were, well. They weren’t all there, you know. You and I were talking, and Cas - I have no idea why, but he was interrogating a cat, serious as anything. Giving him the same look he used to give me, when we first met.” Sam is laughing now, just a bit, and Dean wants to bristle in defense of Cas.

“Yeah, well, the lady there told us he was a suspect. That case was wacky, man, the cat could have actually talked for all we know. Hell, it’s not like we haven’t seen talking animals ourselves, right?” 

He’s about to ask Sam, again, what his point is, but — the memories are clear in his mind, well-formed. 

Not just Cas, strangely gentle in the wake of his return to Earth, trying so hard to come across as _normal_ that he missed the mark by a mile, but a hundred adjoining memories also, spiderwebbing off from that one. Cas, visibly rolling his eyes as he lifted an anvil without breaking a sweat. 

_Talking to animals_ rolls into that case where he’d talked to dogs — Christ, not his most dignified moment — and it rolls into finding Miracle, the only good thing at the end of the world, which rolls into the final confrontation with Chuck, that precise moment when he’d met Jack’s eyes by the shore of a lake, known in a split second, hope rising in his heart and dread falling heavy in his stomach, that they were going to _win_ and that it was going to cost them something precious at the same time. 

He huffs out a laugh, giving Sam a half smile as he realizes what he’s up to. Sam was always the smarter one anyway, should have known he’d figure out the best way to hold the memories firm and bright in his head. He thinks for a second about teasing Sam about finally having an excuse to _talk it out_ , the way he’d always been nagging Dean to do after the shit really hit the fan in their lives. 

He doesn’t, though. Just pushes a branch out of the way where it’s hanging low between the trees, and says, “Tell me about the rest of your life.” 

And so they walk, no destination, no direction other than _keep moving_ , and Sam tells him about everything he missed. About how Eileen texted him every day after she heard about Dean’s death — no questions, no expectation of a response, but just a dozen tiny updates, observations. An anecdote about a kid she saved being more worried about having missed a lacrosse tournament than the fact he’d nearly been eaten by a rugaru. A selfie in a dive bar, Eileen grinning in the low lighting and a fist fight visible directly behind her, sent with the caption _I think I should give them lessons. They both hit like babies._

Sam talks, voice soft over the crunch of pine needles underfoot, about how he hadn’t been able to respond for weeks, too caught up in his grief, but when she sent something about the werewolf she was tracking — how it was turning high school kids and she was having trouble bringing herself to hunt them — that he could finally do something. How he’d video called Eileen, full of apologies for his lack of responses, and she’d waved him off; how they’d worked together to get word of the werewolf cure they’d figured out to as many hunters as they could, trusting the reliable gossip networks to do the rest.

Sam explains how he stopped hunting, after Dean, but he never left the community. There’s quiet confidence in his voice as he describes the way, with Eileen’s help, he consolidated the research from the Men of Letters before leaving the bunker, taking their centuries of formal research, combining it with his and Dean’s more hands-on knowledge, and setting up a kind of online hunter’s journal. 

“I mean, Dean, you remember how many new hunters we met out there who had no idea what they were doing? You and I got lucky with Dad’s journal or being able to call Bobby, but — I’m not saying it should be _easy_ to be a hunter but if you’re already in the life, you know. No one should die because they don’t know they needed silver to kill a wraith.”

The pride Dean feels listening to Sam rises up in his throat, so thick it could choke him. He thinks about watching Sam step up as a leader with the refugees from apocalypse world, how he carried himself differently when they looked to him for guidance — not just Dean’s kid brother but a leader, a captain in his own right. 

“I’m proud of you, Sammy,” he says, the words hardly enough. 

Sam lights up a bit. “I just wish you’d been there to see it.”

And that’s — yeah, that’s the bitter twist in Dean’s gut that he has to grit his teeth against. He got the end that he always thought he’d have, sure, but there was so much tangled in his head in those last few weeks he never even had time to unpack. 

It was a new world after Chuck, but. 

It was also a new world after — after Cas. After one moment that tore everything Dean thought he knew inside out, put everything he pretended he didn’t want within reach and then snatched it away. 

Then they won, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. So much in the world that they could enjoy, now, free of guilt, free of pressure, and if he lied to himself enough he could almost convince himself he was happy. But he was tired, so tired of pretending, of lying to himself as he lay awake at night. When he felt the darkness coming, in the barn, he thought _at least I can get some goddamn rest._

It’s too much to bear — dwelling on what happened, what could have happened. It was his fault, letting himself picture a future with Sam and Cas, retirement, his toes in the sand and a beer in his hand. If he hadn’t let himself imagine an end to the road that wasn’t a bullet, a blade, a spray of blood — once the dream got its hooks into him he couldn’t let it go. He thinks of Cas saying _When I experienced a moment of true happiness, it would take me forever_ and thinks, _you and me both, pal_. 

As soon as Dean let himself think about an _after_ , that was it for him and his happiness. As soon as he hoped for more out of his life, that’s when reality showed up: as a rush of oily darkness coming to claim what it’s owed; as a length of rebar in the back.

Dean’s been quiet for way too long. He can’t fumble a response to Sam now, thinks Sam doesn’t expect one of him. Instead, he pulls himself together, asks Sam to share another story about Eileen.

Time passes. They go back and forth, sharing memories as they come back — Dean has to brace himself against a tree and breathe heavy when something in Sam’s story triggers _Charlie_ for him. 

By the time Dean decides they need a change of strategy, their forearms are covered in the names of their people. The ones already up here: _Charlie, Ellen, Jo_ ; the ones they hope have some time before they make it up: _Jody, Claire, Donna, Garth—_ Dean thinks back to before they’d figured out that something was wrong here, thinks about the way his stomach had flipped when he’d expected to see his family and had found only the facsimiles of his parents. He hears Bobby's voice, long ago, telling him _family don’t end in blood, boy._

But as much progress as they’ve made recovering their memories, they have to admit they’re going nowhere in terms of getting out. He’s trying to hold the thought at a distance, the one that keeps circling his head during moments of silence: 

_What if we never get out of here?_

He crushes it down, again, clenches his fist so hard his fingernails dig into his palms. They’ll find a way. They always have.

Sam pointed out that the trees have started to repeat — they’re not going in circles, but every time they pause to write a new name, the next 20 yards of forest are exactly the same as the stretch they’ve just come through. 

“How do you feel about climbing a tree?” Dean asks, and he’s mostly joking but partially not.

He takes a deep breath as Sam scoffs, turning in a slow circle to examine their surroundings.

“Wait,” Sam says, freezing. “What’s that?” He turns back, looking from side to side.

It’s just a solid line of trees.

“It’s a tree, Sam,” Dean says.

“Very helpful. No, I swear I saw something, out of the corner of my eye, just for a second—” he turns again. “There!”

It’s still just a solid line of trees.

“Maybe I’m, uh, not seeing the forest for the trees here, but…there’s nothing there, Sam.”

Sam frowns. “It’s not there when I look straight at it, but — try to look in your peripheral vision, okay?”

Grimacing, Dean attempts to do as he’s told — it’s a lot harder than he’d expect, all his instincts telling him not to turn away from the hunt, not to break his line of sight. He looks back and forth, but his peripheral vision yields nothing but more goddamn trees.

“Damnit, Sam—” and he turns, and he sees it. 

It’s gone as soon as he tries to focus directly, of course, but there was a clear glimpse in the corner of his eye of — well. He can’t think of a better description than _a crack in the world._ Perfectly even, just a narrow gap in the trees stretching up and down as far as his vision allowed. 

He remembers pulling motel doors open with the chain still latched, peering through the narrow gap to confirm it was his Dad knocking. A long, narrow stretch of _outside._ Something is outside, or inside, or some other way adjacent to them.

“You saw it too, right?” Sam confirms.

Dean nods, shuffling sideways until he’s closer to where the gap had appeared. Looking back at Sam, he catches another glimpse out of the corner of his eye. There’s something glittering; lights on the other side, and he feels like if he just— turns—

He’s not in the forest anymore.

The home — more like apartment, judging by the low ceilings and the fire escape out the window — is small, cozy. Bright Christmas lights strung up around the walls and the smell of vanilla and cinnamon in the air are like a punch to the gut for Dean, stirring up distant sense memories he didn’t even realize he still had. _Good Kind Wenceslas_ plays faintly, crackling with radio static, and in the kitchen a dark-haired girl — a kid, really, no more than 5 or 6 in Dean’s eyes — perched on a stool grins at an older woman. 

“Try it, _nai nai_!” she says, holding out a cookie. The steam’s still rising off it; they must be fresh out of the oven. 

“You first,” the woman — Dean assumes grandmother — says, eyes crinkling with warmth. 

The girl bites into her cookie. Dean’s vantage point doesn’t let him see her face but from the way her grandmother grins, she must be delighted. 

“Try it, _nai nai_!” the girl says again, holding out the cookie. 

It’s whole, unbitten.

The grandmother tells her to try it first, and the girl bites the cookie, and then she offers it again, and it’s unbitten.

“Fuck,” Dean hisses under his breath, but neither seems to hear him. 

Another loop. Just like the highway, but smaller — a tiny bubble of joy repeated over and over again. He wonders whose Heaven this is, the girl’s or the grandmother’s. Is the other just a paper cut-out, a flimsy copy like his too-happy-to-be-real parents? 

“Sam?” 

He doesn’t get a response, and he turns to look—

After the warm glow of Christmas lights in a dim apartment, bright sunlight makes him blink hard. 

He’s not in the home anymore.

There are flowers everywhere, and two women in white lean in for a kiss under a white canopy draped in vines. Both of them have tears in their eyes, and the taller one runs her thumb along the other one’s cheekbone as they smile at each other.

Dean nearly jumps out of his skin as the crowd breaks out in applause.

The women grin, then they kiss again, and again, and again.

Dean’s eyes catch on the gentle trace of thumb along cheekbone. There’s no one here to lie to, and he’s too tired of lying to himself to pretend his attention is caught by _heh chicks kissing._ He’s frozen by this, their joy so palpable it flips something over in his chest. 

He stares for another long moment. Then, bracing himself, he turns again.

Another tiny Heaven, and another, and another.

He watches a man win a gold medal for Brazil at the Olympics, and a mother in a hospital bed look in awe down at her newborn baby, and a man in a classroom read a letter at his desk that makes him cry, and another wedding, and another newborn baby.

He stays for a long time watching a man beam with joy as his teenage son confidently shifts gears on an open stretch of road, wind rushing by the car window.

This must be what it’s like to be a ghost, he thinks, distantly remembering that one time that he and Sam actually _were_ ghosts. Watching the world go by around you, not able to interfere. Just bearing witness.

He turns, and he’s in another hospital room with a new mother, and he feels so trapped he could scream.

He does scream. They don’t notice. He’s not part of their happiness.

Another wedding. Another award. A woman bumps into a man and spills her coffee, and looks up in annoyance but then their eyes meet and something changes and they both begin to smile.

Another happy family. He’s turning faster and faster now, desperate to get back to the forest — he doesn’t know if Sam’s behind him in all this or if he’s still back amid the trees. 

Then — something stops him. The light’s different, unearthly — relative to the scenes he’s been watching, the colors are so vibrant it’s like someone cranked up the saturation. He’s in some kind of a large tent, with rugs and cushions piled high on the floor like something out of a movie. A low table is laden with an odd assortment of weapons — scimitars, pistols, spearsand two women kneel beside it, face to face. 

The dark-haired woman strokes a hand through the other’s red hair — hair that burns unearthly bright in the strange air here, but something about the way it catches the light takes the air right out of Dean’s lungs. 

It can’t be. 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” she says to the red-headed woman. “But Charlie Bradbury, if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you are going to save us.” 

_Charlie_.

Dean feels like his heart’s going to crack open. “Charlie,” he says, and it’s not like she’ll be able to hear the way his voice catches — fuck, he’s so happy to see her, the original version of _her_ , it’s almost enough to drown out the fact that he’s an invisible, mute observer paralyzed in the corner. 

Except—

She cocks her head, just a bit.

“Did you hear something?” she says, frowning at the other woman — Dorothy, Dean recognizes her now.

Dorothy smiles at her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” she says.

“Fucking— Charlie! Can you hear me? Charlie!” Dean’s desperate, afraid to move for fear he’ll accidentally step sideways out of here and lose this.

Charlie’s frowning now, looking concerned at Dorothy, who continues to recite her lines. 

“Something’s wrong,” she says.

“You’re goddamn right it is,” Dean tells her.

Charlie looks up — looks right at Dean. Their eyes meet.

“Dean?”

She sees him. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reunions, explanations, and filing cabinets.

“Holy shit, Dean! How are you— what’s going on?” Charlie looks stunned, eyes flicking between Dorothy and Dean and around the tent like she’s confused by where she is.

Dean doesn’t have words for a second, too caught up in the joy of seeing her again. It’s the original Charlie, he knows it in his bones — her counterpart from Apocalypse World may have looked exactly the same, but it doesn’t matter. He’d know her anywhere, even if he thought he’d never see her again.

There’s guilt too, cold and thick down his spine when the image of the last time he saw her flashes before his eyes. But Dean hardly knows how to love without guilt coming along for the ride. Pressing it down, keeping his focus where he wants it, is an old habit. 

She stands and steps towards him, and he hesitates for a second — still so paranoid about accidentally stepping out of this — before delicately stepping forward and wrapping his arms around her. She’s solid, warm in his arms as she hugs back, dousing a fear that he didn’t even realize was smoldering in the back of his mind. 

It’s almost too much, and he presses his face tightly to her hair for a second to gather himself.

She pulls back, examines him critically.

“Dude. What the _hell_ is going on here.”

Dean doesn’t want to know, but he has to ask. “What do you remember?”

She frowns, concentrating. “Hang on, it’s there but it’s just out of reach—”

Her eyes go wide, scared for a second. Dean watches as she processes the memory of what must be her last moments on earth and then visibly pulls herself together, cool and confident as ever. It’s only a second, but Dean knows what putting a mask on looks like. 

“Some not fun time with the creepy cult guy. Knives were involved. And then I was here.” She pauses, squints closely at Dean. The memory of the motel bathtub flickers up behind his eyes again, and he has to look away from her. He can’t meet her eyes. “It feels like it was only a moment ago, but that’s not right, is it?”

“No,” he tells her, and hears the gruffness in his own voice as he tries to collect himself. “Well, I don’t know. Time doesn’t really make sense here. But … it was a while ago. For me, at least.” 

He can meet her eyes then, and knows she must see the shadows in his by the way her lips tighten.

“When you say ‘here’…” she starts, trails off deliberately to prompt him.

“Heaven,” he says, and adds dryly: “Congratulations.” 

“So you’re dead too?” she asks, and he doesn’t want to engage with the gentleness in her voice.

“Well, you know me, it’s hardly the first time," he waves a hand, casual. "So anyway, it turns out there’s something really fucked up here. Like our memories are being messed with.”

He looks over, behind her, to where the fake Dorothy keeps going through the motions. Watching her speak to no one, lean in towards empty air, is deeply unsettling. He’s reminded of the life-size animatronics he’d seen occasionally at traveling circuses, jolting movements playing at being human, and it raises the hairs on the back of his neck.

Charlie follows his gaze. “Obviously that’s not really Dorothy,” she says. “It’s just a memory of her.” 

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Heaven used to be like this. No independent thinking, just living in your memories. But when I got here, they told me that had been fixed. Obviously that was a lie.” 

“And so you came busting through Heaven like the Kool-Aid Man to set us all free, is that it?”

“ _Oh yeah!_ ” Dean imitates the old cartoon to make her laugh. “Nah, I have no idea what I’m doing. I was with Sam, and then I wound up, I don’t know, slipping between Heavens. I was stuck for a while before I saw you — before you could hear me. But I want to figure out what’s going wrong here, why we’re all trapped.” 

“You know, Dean, if you’re trying to change Heaven, some people may not want to take the red pill. If they’re happy in their best memories. You know, at peace.”

Shame clenches cold fingers in Dean’s gut. He hadn’t thought — but she’d been at peace, with Dorothy. Even if it had been an illusion, she deserved that, and he’d broken it. 

She continues, blithely, like he’s not having a crisis here. “Not me, though! Jailbreaking Heaven? Sign me up.” She steps over to the low table and picks up a narrow blade, feeling the weight of it in her hand for a moment before nodding decisively. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

Dean follows her lead to the entryway to the tent, lifting up the heavy fabric so she can duck underneath before following suit.

Outside—

They’re back in the tent.

“God _damnit.”_

Charlie’s got a look of momentary confusion, and Dean — remembering being thrown back, time after time, into the Impala rolling down the highway — quickly recaps for her where they are and what’s going on. 

“That explains _those_ ,” she says, pointing to the names visible on his forearm where his sleeve is rolled up. 

“Sam and I — if we got comfortable, we’d lose the thread. I didn’t want to forget the people that mattered.” 

He touches the inside of his wrist on instinct, feels his face heat when he realizes she can see where his fingertips land, but she doesn’t comment. 

“So what’s the next move, Morpheus?” Charlie asks.

And Dean’s thinking: if they hold onto each other, maybe they’ll be able to keep together as they move through Heavens? Or maybe he’ll find himself alone again, silent witness to everyone else’s happiness. And Charlie would be trapped too, then — 

There’s a pressure in his chest that he thinks may be panic, and he breathes deep.

The pressure doesn’t let up. It feels like a physical thing in the room.

“Dean?” Charlie’s asking, and he can tell she feels it too, by the way she rubs at her chest. 

His ears feel full, like he’s heading up into the mountains and the elevation’s getting to him — he swallows, but they don’t pop—

And then Sam’s there. The pressure in the room is gone. 

“Dean, thank god! And — oh my god. Charlie.”

They’re hugging, everyone’s hugging, and for a moment Dean can forget how fucked up everything is, can just focus on the joy that bubbles up seeing both of them here — if not alive, then at least whole and happy. 

“We’re all on the same page, right? Like — Dean’s got you up to speed on what’s going on here?” Sam asks her.

“If ‘we’re all dead, Heaven is broken, and I don’t have any answers about what’s going on’ counts as getting me up to speed, then yes.”

Sam huffs a laugh, face twisting into a begrudging smile. “Sounds about right.” He looks around the tent, eyes passing over the memory of Dorothy without comment.“So are we in Oz?”

“See for yourself,” Charlie says, gesturing with her sword at the opening to the tent.

Dean and Charlie don’t move, waiting for Sam to duck through the entrance and find himself back where he was.

As he lifts the tent flap, faint music greets them and a narrow stream of moonlight catches Sam’s face where he ducks underneath.

“Whoa, you guys, this is so cool!” Sam’s voice calls back to them. 

From where he is, distinctly, outside the tent.

Dean and Charlie look at each other.

“How did he—?” Dean starts, then sighs, starting towards the tent flap. “You know what, that’s hardly the weirdest thing to happen today.”

“Looks like we unlocked a map expansion,” Charlie says, ducking under where he’s lifted the fabric for her.

It’s nighttime outside, but a bright moon low in the sky lights their surroundings, making the cobblestones underfoot gleam and catching on a motley assortment of tents and shelters surrounding them. Hooves clatter in the distance and Dean breathes in the smell of wood smoke, hay and leather.

Everything feels just a little vibrant — the moon is too bright, stars too close, the few torches lit between tents glowing unnaturally bright. Even though, logically, Dean knows that they’ve been in Heaven this whole time, it’s only now, faced with the strange reality of Oz, that he’s hit by just how out of his fucking depth he is. 

He tells himself, like a mantra: _We’re gonna get out of this. We’re gonna find Cas. We’re gonna fix things._

“This is from your memory, right?” Sam’s asking Charlie. 

“Must be,” Charlie says. “Only we couldn’t get out of the tent before, when it was just Dean and me.” 

Sam frowns. “So why’d that change when I got here? If this is your memory.”

“Because not one but three human souls could not possibly be contained in a loop of memory as small as Ms. Bradbury’s original Heaven.”

It’s a new voice.

Dean whips to the side, bristling. In his periphery, he sees Sam shift into a defensive stance, Charlie grip her sword a bit tighter.

Not that it will do any good on the woman standing before them, he knows, as he gets a good look at her in the too-bright moonlight.

Because, new hairstyle aside, Dean knows her.

“Naomi.” 

“Winchesters,” she says in return, pleasant customer service voice doing nothing to conceal her obvious irritation. “And Ms. Bradbury, who I presume is an honorary Winchester.”

“I should have known this was your game,” he says. “Haven’t you messed with enough heads already?”

She looks at him sadly, like she’s disappointed. “Dean, Dean. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, and you know what? I’ve always _dealt_ with it just fine.” He knows the threat in his tone is clear.

“Your bravery is commendable, if ill-advised,” she says.

“Dean, can we get a round of introductions here?” Charlie says.

Before he can respond, Naomi cuts in smoothly. “Of course. My name is Naomi. I’m an angel, and my job is to protect heaven.” 

“She’s a psycho, and she screws with people’s heads. She did it to Cas, now she’s doing it to us.” He’s not going to get over the way she used Cas like a puppet to attack him, on his knees in a dusty crypt watching Cas — _Cas,_ his best friend — bear down on him with a cold, detached look in his eyes. “She’s probably been watching us this whole time, laughing.”

“Actually, it was quite concerning when I realized the two of you were no longer in your Heaven. We — lost track of you, until you wound up here. Three human souls in one place? The emotional resonance alone — it was like a sudden forest fire in a row of candles.” She sighs, brushes her hands together like she’s shaking off something distasteful. “Well, it’s too late now, you may as well come with me.”

She waves a hand, and they’re out of Oz.

After vibrant unreality of Oz, the neutral office space is even more drab, everything a toneless gray or white. It’s clean, sterile, devoid of personality — sounds about right for Heaven, Dean thinks. 

They’re standing in front of a gray metal filing cabinet; behind it, Dean sees another one, and he can’t tell how large the space is but he gets the sudden sense that the cabinets go on for a while. 

“So Heaven is a Staples warehouse these days,” he says.

“This is, of course, a defense mechanism for your human eyes. If you were to perceive Heaven as it truly is, you would go blind and insane.”

“So the filing cabinet is what, a visual metaphor?” Sam asks. 

She gives Sam a look like she’s both impressed and annoyed about it. “You might as well say that. Similarly, you’re perceiving me as you would have on Earth, in the last vessel I wore. It’s simpler all around.”

Charlie’s peering at the labels on the drawers. “How many are there?”

“A lot. I’ll give you the tour later. For now, there’s something you should see.” She crosses to a door Dean hadn’t noticed before and opens it, gesturing at them to come through.

Dean doesn’t move a muscle.

“I think you owe us some answers before we go anywhere with you. You can start with, why the hell were you messing with our memories?”

She sighs at him like he’s a particularly stubborn child, and he clenches his jaw.

“I’m trying to give you that explanation, Dean. You’ll notice you are here, with your memories intact now? It’s clear to me now that no good will come of continuing to try to give you the peaceful rest you’ve earned.”

Dean looks over at Sam and Charlie. He and Sam have been communicating without words for years, so Sam knows that the way his eyes flick deliberately over at Naomi and back means _what do you think?_ Sam half lifts a shoulder — _I don’t know what to make of this, so keeping options open for now._ Lifts his chin, _I’ll follow your lead._

Dean nods, minutely. He doesn’t trust Naomi as far as he could throw her, but he doesn’t have a weapon that’ll work on her and for now, it seems like the best play is to try to get more information. If she wanted to kill them — well, they’re already dead. And it’s true that she hasn’t locked them back in the Impala-memory again. 

He follows her to the door. 

The hall outside is gleaming white. Dean hasn’t spent much time in corporate America but he thinks this is the kind of place normal people work 9-to-5 jobs at computers with inspirational posters on the walls. 

Naomi sets off down the hallway, gesturing for them to follow.

“I understand you think we are the bad guys here,” she says, heels clacking on the floor as she leads.“You think we are toying with your memories for fun, or to cause you pain. Let me be clear about what’s happening here.”

She pauses beside one of the white doors. For a moment, she takes a breath, like she’s steeling herself. Then she opens the door.

The room is — _crawling_ , is the first word that comes to Dean’s mind. _Pulsing_ , maybe. It’s thick with oily blackness, thick ropes twisting and coiling against each other from the ceiling, the walls, until the original white color of the room is all but choked out by the darkness.

Dean knows this darkness. 

The oil of it is familiar, ripped straight out of one of his worst memories — one he’s tried not to think about since the moment it came back to him, standing beside the Impala on a fake highway, drowning in twelve years’ worth of friendship and betrayal and love and loss. 

This thing, this invasion into Heaven. It’s the same thing that stole Cas away from him.

“What _is_ that?” Sam’s asking, but it’s not Naomi that answers.

Numb, voice sounding far away over the rush of blood in his head, Dean tells him, “It’s the Empty.”

He feels the weight of Sam and Charlie’s eyes on him, but he can’t look at them, too transfixed by what’s in the room. Does it connect back to the Empty? he wonders. If it’s a — a door, or a path somehow. 

“It — breached Heaven, some time ago. We were able to subdue it, at the time. Your friend Castiel was greatly helpful in that,” Naomi says, magnanimous, like Dean doesn’t have to grit his teeth at the sound of Cas’s name in her mouth. 

Something catches on a jagged edge in his mind, and he realizes — what she’s talking about, and Cas saying _I made a deal —_ this must have been it, then. _We were able to subdue it_ , she said, like Cas didn’t give up goddamn _everything_ in that moment. 

“We didn’t realize at the time, but its intrusion left traces. Fault lines. And one day something happened within the Empty itself — we aren’t sure what. But there was a catastrophic noise that echoed throughout Heaven, and now —” she gestures again at the oily blackness twisting inside. “This is only one area. It’s been spreading, since then.”

She shuts the door. Dean, transfixed by the darkness, has to blink against the sudden brightness of the white door. Spots, after effects, twist in his vision. 

“Heaven is unstable,” Naomi tells them. “To fight this off would be a losing battle — we don’t have manpower, and we don’t have the weapons to defend against this. So now, Heaven is slowly but surely coming apart.”

She looks directly at Dean now. “You asked why your memories were limited. This is why. We tucked the human souls away into the smallest loops of their memories for safekeeping, because so much of Heaven is structurally unsound, we do not have enough angels to maintain anything close to the full power of Heaven, and all we can do is try to buy time. This is so much bigger than your own personal discontentments. We made these changes for the greater good.” 

“Wait, okay, Grindelwald, I get there’s a greater good and all that, but how come these two got to be together when the rest of us were isolated?” Charlie asks with a frown, jerking her thumb at Sam and Dean. 

“If there’s one thing we wanted to avoid during a period of potential total collapse in Heaven, it was a Winchester brother galumphing all over the place trying to find the other one. We assumed — obviously incorrectly — that you two together would stay out of our way, especially if we gave you a little more space to roam.” Her tone makes it clear that the allusionto particularly stubborn farm animals was very much intentional. 

Dean scoffs, but it’s Sam who cuts in, disbelieving. “I was _married —_ you thought I’d just, what, forget about Eileen? My wife?”

“Yes, well, it turns out that giving you an inch more independence led to the entire system coming undone so, we’ve certainly learned our lesson for next time.” If Dean thought her voice was dry before, it’s a desert now. 

“If you give a Winchester a cookie, he’s probably going to wind up destroying Heaven,” Charlie says in an aside, raising an eyebrow at Dean. Despite himself, he snorts with laughter. 

A question comes to Dean, then. “When I first got here, Bobby told me — or, you guys told me through Bobby — that Jack and Cas had fixed up heaven. Was that just to throw me off the scent, or what?”

Naomi’s eyes widen, just for a second, but the reaction is clear. For the first time since they got here, she’s genuinely wrong-footed, caught off guard. “You said — Castiel was in the message?”

“Yeah, that Jack had set everything right and Cas helped. That wasn’t you?”

“The appearance of Bobby telling you that there was free will in Heaven now, yes, we set that up. It seemed necessary, for a human who already understood something of the workings of Heaven, to make sure you didn’t, well — do exactly what you did. But we never mentioned Castiel in the message, for the same reason that we obscured Eileen from Sam’s memory.” Dean’s face heats as she continues, smoothly, “And anyone else you had an emotional attachment to, of course.”

Charlie’s asking the obvious question, “If that wasn’t you guys, then why did Bobby say Cas’s name as well?” and Naomi’s giving an answer that makes it clear she has no idea, but Dean—

Dean can hardly listen to it. He’s still stuck on how baldly she’d made the comparison. Like it wasn’t anything to say that what Eileen was to Sam — his _wife_ , his spouse — that’s what Cas was to Dean. Like in her eyes, they’re as good as married. 

And Naomi has no idea why Cas’s name came through. But Dean has — well, he doesn’t have a clue, but he’s got something twisting in his heart that might be hope, or maybe stubbornness, or maybe both. He thinks about the twisting ropes of darkness tracing their way into heaven; thinks about Bobby saying _Cas helped;_ thinks about Cas, a lifetime ago, saying _I heard your prayer._

_Cas?_ he thinks. _You out there?_

He’s setting himself up for failure, he knows, not sure how much more damage a heart that’s already as broken as his is can take, but. If this doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter anyway. 

He looks again at the blank white door, knowing what’s behind it. Behind the door, through the blackness — somewhere, on the other side, Cas is out there. 

_I’m gonna find you,_ he thinks again. _Hold on, buddy. I’m coming._

* * *

Naomi takes them back to the filing cabinet room. There's an awkward pause, and she looks almost expectant, like she’s waiting. 

It’s Sam that calls her on it: “You think you could use our help, isn’t that right? It’s the only reason you’d give us the tour instead of locking us up even tighter.”

She sighs, and Dean can see how much it hurts her ego to admit it.

“I am out of options here. You’ve both — all three of you, really — shown yourselves to be remarkably successful in taking on challenges far more than any human should be able to handle. Even breaking free of your own Heaven, like you did. And,” she looks down, “many angels have come to see the value of human ingenuity in recent times. Many were too hasty to judge.”

Dean’s pretty sure the shamefaced look is just an act, that she’s trying to manipulate them to play to, what, their species ego? It doesn’t matter, though. He’s got an opening.

“It just so happens that you may be in luck,” Dean says. 

The look’s off her face in an instant, so Dean thinks he was right about it being an act. It’s replaced by calculation. “Is that so?” she asks, assessing. 

“Hey, no guarantees,” he tells her with a wide shrug. “But we’ve dealt with the Empty before. I’m pretty sure we can fix this. Fix Heaven.”

Sam gives him a fraction of a look. Dean taught Sam how to play poker, and Sam knows all his tells — knows what it looks like when he’s bluffing. Dean pointedly doesn’t look at Sam, trusting he’ll back his play.

“You said you didn’t know what happened inside the Empty to cause the damage,” Sam says. “We do.” 

Dean’s glad that Naomi asks, “You do?” because he had the same question himself, and doesn’t want to reveal his bluff by asking.

“Yeah,” Sam says, and looks over at Dean and Charlie like he knows they’re all just as much in the dark as Naomi. “Jack. He was loaded up with energy, like a weapon, and had to release it somewhere that wouldn’t cause any damage. That’s gotta be what happened to the Empty, right?”

“The nephilim? Interesting.” 

“Like Dean said. We’ve got experience with this,” Sam’s voice is confident, and Dean loves him for playing along so smoothly with Dean’s bullshit. 

“We’ll need some supplies, though," Dean adds. "And some help. You’re going to have to pop open some of those filing cabinets.”

She gives him a long look, eyes narrowed in consideration. “How do you I know you’re not just trying to cause more chaos? You’ve never been an ally of Heaven.”

“No, but I’m an ally of people. These people, these souls here? They deserve their rest, and they deserve a real Heaven where they can stretch their legs, not some bullshit snow globe version of happiness. So we’re going to help you get things under control here, and then we’re going to put Heaven to rights — for real this time. That’s the deal.”

At last, she nods. “It’s a deal.” She turns to the wall and picks up a white phone that definitely wasn’t there a second ago. “Iridiel, to me,” she says into the receiver, then hangs up.

“Iridiel will help you access whatever supplies or assistance you need as you prepare. Please inform her when you are close to ready, and I’ll return.” 

“You’re not staying?” he asks, relieved. 

“You aren’t the only crisis on my plate this morning,” she says. “I only hope whatever plan you’re putting together — that you can be quick about it.” 

Dean meets her eyes and, despite all her bullshit, he sees something in them that he can recognize. A determination to protect her people and her home, no matter what, and a deep fear that nothing can be done to keep them safe. He hates her still, of course, for what she did to Cas, but — he thinks he can understand her a little better. 

He nods at her, and she steps out the door. 

“Dean, what the hell,” Sam says as soon as she’s gone. 

“There’s no way you actually have a plan, right?” Charlie says. “I mean that was great bluffing, but.”

“I’ve got step one of a plan,” Dean says. 

“Well, that’s actually more than I expected,” Sam lifts an eyebrow. “So what is it?”

“Quick recap first,” Dean says, looking over at Charlie. “This entity, the Empty? It’s usually where angels go when they,” he swallows. "When they die. But Cas, he — he had to make a deal with it, and it took him.”

“That’s why you recognized it,” Charlie says, realizing. “When she showed us that room.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was there when he—” he cuts himself off, starts over. “Anyway. We’ve gotten Cas out of the Empty once before, and you heard what she said — about how it wasn’t Heaven that made Bobby say Cas’s name to me.”

“Dean,” Sam says, and his voice is so gentle that Dean knows Sam thinks he’s losing it. “You’re not actually thinking…”

“That we find a way to hotwire the connection on this end so I can stroll straight into the Empty and drag Cas back here?” Dean grins, wide and cocky. “Like I said, step 1.”

“Dean,” Sam says again, and Dean doesn’t want to. Can’t hear him say it.

“Don’t, Sam. I know the odds here, okay. But I just — I got a feeling about this, alright? It’s _Cas_. I can’t not try.”

From the look on Sam’s face, he knows that Sam — well, he may not understand, but he’s not going to argue. 

“So we’re lying to Naomi about having a plan to fix her problem,” Sam says. “You’re playing with fire here, Dean.”

“So, you in?”

Sam heaves a sigh. “When am I not?”

Dean grins; turns to Charlie. “I know this is a little nuts, and I’m sorry to have dragged you into this.”

“Oh, stow it, Winchester. It’s hardly the first time. Plus, I love Cas, of course I’m in for whatever insanity you’ve cooked up.” 

Dean claps her on the shoulder.

Three humans, lying to angels to sneak into yet another afterlife — one that’s currently semi-exploded — in a desperate rescue attempt? For the first time since he woke up here, Dean feels like he’s actually on solid ground. He’s got Sam, and he’s got Charlie, and he’s got his memories back, and he’s got a refusal-to-accept-reality that’s doing a great job passing for hope. 

“Alright,” he says to the two of them. “Let’s make a plan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello remember when I thought this would be 4 chapters? ha ha. I am sorry we are three chapters in and cas has still not showed up but hopefully you enjoy....uhhh....lots of dialogue and an "i'm not the villain" monologue instead?? 
> 
> also I have one (1) fake angel name that I will just keep using between fics


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy birthday Dean Winchester, this one's for you. Dean wouldn't use a beta so neither did I.

Of course, when it comes down to it, there’s really not much to plan. Dean had some vague ideas of trying to pop out Pamela or Missouri to help, but they realize pretty quickly they don’t know anything about the Empty. No idea if a psychic link could even work, and anyway Dean’s not going to let anyone he cares about near the seething darkness in that room. 

They ask the angel, Iridiel, if Heaven has some kind of information about the Empty. Looking annoyed, she says flatly, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said— ”

“Okay, yes, thanks. We get it,” Charlie says. “I’ve had plenty of Sunday School already, I don’t need any more.” 

So the angels are another dead end. 

“You know, the only person who might be able to help is Jack,” Sam says, finally. 

“You mentioned Jack earlier,” Charlie says, turning to him. “Naomi said he was a nephilim?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “Half-angel, half-human.”

“He’s our kid,” Dean cuts in, guilt heavy in the words but no doubt in his head anymore. 

Charlie stares at him. “You have a half-angel child. You, and…”

“And Cas,” Dean finishes her sentence. 

He can’t remember the last time he saw Charlie genuinely at a loss for words.

Sam sighs. “Oh, no, jeez, Charlie, he’s not, like biologically our kid—“

“ _Oh_ ,” she says, looking significantly more at ease.

“—he’s Lucifer’s son, technically, but we’re his family.”

Her eyebrows go right back up.

“And he’s absorbed all of God’s power, so I figured maybe he could help us out,” Sam finishes.

Charlie looks back and forth between them like she’s waiting for someone to yell _gotcha!_ “Boy, you guys really stayed busy, didn’t you?”

Dean winks at her. “Remind me to tell you about how I killed Hitler.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Sam reprimands, rolling his eyes.

“I don’t know, man,” Dean tells him, serious again. “All I know is that the angels lied to me, told me he’d fixed Heaven. You were on Earth a lot longer than me — did you ever see him again?”

Sam looks down at his hands, and his voice is quieter. “No. I — I prayed to him. A lot. Not asking for anything, just. You know, talking to him. I never got an answer back but I don’t know that I really expected one. After you — after you died, and he didn’t step in, I figured he must have meant it when he said that he was gonna be hands off.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and he can’t blame the kid. It’s what he wanted, what they all wanted, to be able to live without celestial interference. Still, it would have been a lot easier if Jack and Cas were here.

There’s really only one thing for it.

+

“Absolutely not,” Sam says, at the same time Charlie is saying “Dude you are out of your _mind_.” From the door, the angel Iridiel says, “Um. Do I need to call Naomi back?”

Dean stares into the twisting darkness. He knows what it must look like, the idea of just strolling into the center of it and hoping that he pops out the other side in one piece, that he can find Cas, that Cas is okay, and that somehow they can make their way back. As far as plans go, it’s not his best.

“It’s Cas, guys,” he says instead. 

“I know, Dean, but we have no idea if this will work—“

“—you’re going to get stuck there forever—”

“I know, I know it’s a risk, but, listen. It’s Cas,” he says again, helpless. There’s nothing he can say that could possibly explain it any better than that.

Sam sounds frustrated, frantic. “Dean, can you just hold on, we can figure something out before you—” he cuts himself off sharply, but Dean hears the shape of the unsaid words in the air.

“Before I kill myself? Sam, I’m already dead.” 

“Yeah, and we can talk another time about how quickly you gave up, but now let’s just take a deep breath, okay? And back away from the darkness?”

“Sorry, Sam,” Dean says. “It’s not like I haven’t gone to worse places for the people I love, right?” He steps forward, deeper into the room. He turns, points at Sam who’s looking shaken. “Don’t come after me, okay? It’ll be okay, Sammy. But you gotta promise me.”

“I won’t,” he says, solemn and immediate, and Dean’s hit abruptly by how much older Sam is than him now. There was a time when that would have been a fight. But now Sam has other people in his life to watch out for. 

And Dean — Dean has Cas, just a few steps and a world away. He winks at Charlie, grins at Sam with all the cockiness he can muster. “See ya soon.”

The last thing he hears as he steps forward is their voices, in unison, shouting his name. 

And then it’s silent. 

+

One time, when he was probably 12 or 13, they’d stayed for the fall in Muskegon, on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Dean, fascinated by the waves, had gone out to the water while his dad and Sam were picking up food; over-confident, he’d waded further and further out til one of the startlingly powerful lake waves caught him off guard and he was slammed under the water, losing all sense of up and down, body flailing on survival instincts he couldn’t control. Though it was probably only seconds before he clawed his way back to the surface, time seemed to slow down and his brain said, almost calmly, _I’m going to die._

That’s what hits him when the Empty surrounds him.

It’s _wrong_. He’s blind, deaf, every nerve in his body sending conflicting signals, his inner ear telling him he’s upside down and right side up and sideways. When he gasps a breath he’s not sure if he’s even breathing oxygen and he thinks, panicked, _I’m going to die here I can’t I can’t die I have to find Cas—_

_Cas._

_Finding Cas is what matters._

_Breathe._

_Breathe._

If he just focuses on what he’s here for he can tune out the way his body is screaming at him that _he doesn’t belong here_.

He grits his teeth, sets his jaw. _You’re okay_ , Dean tells himself, _Get it together. You’ve been in weird dimensions before. Think about it like you’ve taken a big hit of African dream root._

Forcing himself to calm, he’s startled to realize his right hand is wrapped around his left forearm, thumb pressed into the veins on his inner wrist. Cas’s name written there is smudged by now, ink bleeding into the spidery lines of his wrist, but it’s still there. 

Cas is still there. He’s here somewhere. 

Dean takes another step forward. 

He’d originally processed his surroundings as complete, absolute darkness, but with the adrenaline flooding his veins sharpening his senses, he realizes he was wrong. 

The darkness around him is moving. 

It’s faint, a crawling pulsing movement that catches at the corners of his eyes, raises the hairs on the back of his neck. Trying to focus on it sends up the flare of _wrongness_ in his brain that makes his breath catch and his heartbeat echo in his ears. 

He looks back down at his hands instead, and keeps walking — where, he has no idea. Just moving forward. 

The silence presses in on him.

“Cas?” he says, out loud, to break the quiet. “Man, I hope you’ve got service here. Can you — can you hear me? I’m gonna find you, okay? You gotta wait for me, but I’m coming.”

He keeps going. There’s nothing to do but walk, and swallow his panic, and pray to Cas. 

He tells Cas about nothing in particular. Tells him to hold on, apologizes for not coming sooner. With the constant movement in his periphery making his skin crawl, he feels like he’s being watched and he can’t say any of the hundred terrifying fragile things that twist up in his chest when he thinks about the last time he saw Cas. Those are for him and Cas alone, not the hostile darkness. 

But anger is vulnerability’s closest neighbor, spilling easy off his tongue. 

“What the hell was that, you making a deal and not telling me? After everything, everything with Crowley, and with Gadreel, and with Hell — I thought we were done making deals, man. I thought we were done keeping secrets. We could have fixed it, Cas, you should’ve told me. We would have found a way.” He’s half-yelling now, rage and grief shouted into the darkness. “You do this every goddamn time, you wait until it’s too late and I can’t help you. I’m friggin’ pissed at you, man.” 

There’s a tug in his gut. Just barely, but he’s on high alert and every sense is taut like a wire. It’s — he doesn’t know what it is, some deep hunter’s intuition responding to something his brain haven’t processed yet. It’s gone in an instant but trusting his gut kept him alive on every hunt but one — he knows to listen to his instincts. He turns, heading a different direction into the pressing, crawling blackness. 

Time means nothing here. It’s just one foot in front of the other, boots landing on no surface he can see. Just keeping his mind carefully blank of anything except the mission: _Find Cas, bring him home_. Not looking at the darkness, not listening to the fear clawing inside his brain. He focuses on his instincts, trying to feel for another ping in his gut, but the sense is gone now, and the darkness is moving in the corner of his eyes.

He thinks about finding Cas, instead. Thinks about seeing him here in the black, stupid trenchcoat and all, looking exactly the same as he did when he was telling Dean goodbye. Recklessly, Dean imagines sweeping him into a kiss the second he’s close enough, fireworks in the background, band crescendos as Dean dips him low, like something out of an old movie. 

He never lets himself imagine this much and now he clings to it like a lifeline — thinking about Cas’s eyes, his lips, his hands, anything to ward off the darkness.

He’s so focused on calling up the image of Cas that when he takes a step forward and sees him, for a second he thinks it’s just his imagination. 

But he blinks and Cas is still _there._ Twenty-something feet away, turned away from Dean but his hair, his trenchcoat, every line of his body is familiar and dear. 

“Cas,” he tries to say, and his throat is so dry no sound comes out. He steps closer, swallowing. “Cas?” 

As he approaches, he sees tension in the line of Cas’s shoulders, and he still doesn’t turn. 

“Cas, buddy — I’m here for you. I’m gonna bring you home.” 

He’s so close he could reach out and touch Cas’s back. He lifts one hand— but Cas turns, instead. His face is _devastated_ , eyes lifeless, and his voice is hoarse as he says. “Please, just go away.” 

There’s heartbreak written in every line of Cas’s face, and Dean just stares at him. Of everything, this is the last thing he expected. It’s not like he actually thought he’d get the old Hollywood reunion kiss, but this? Rejection? He’s usually expecting disappointment but this time he’s blindsided. 

“Cas?” he asks, confused. 

“Please,” Cas says again. Dean has never heard him beg, and something deep inside him shatters. “No.”

“Cas, it’s me,” he says, helpless. “I came for you.”

Cas shudders, eyes full of pain. “No,” he rasps again. “Go away.”

Dean clenches his fists, useless, at his sides. “Listen, I get it, you don’t want to see me. I— it’s fine, man. But can I get you out of here, at least? We can go back to Heaven, and then I’ll fuck off and you never have to see me again. I just can’t leave you stuck here.”

As he spoke, Cas’s eyes squeezed shut. “Stop— stop it,” he says, and for the first time Dean hears anger in his voice. “Stop pretending to be him.”

Dean’s eyes widen, and he takes a half step back. For the first time he thinks he has a faint grasp on what’s happening here. “Do you— do you think I’m something else? Some, I don’t know, shapeshifter thing?” 

“Take my shape instead,” Cas says, ignoring his questions — but his words alone are a confirmation. 

Dean hisses out a breath through his teeth, not sure if he’s relieved or horrified. At least he’s on solid footing now.

“Okay, tell me. How do I prove to you it’s actually me?” 

At least this time Cas responds to the question. “That’s exactly what he would ask.” As soon as he says it, he closes his eyes again, like he’s angry at himself for having engaged. 

“No, fuck this.” Dean’s abruptly furious, pissed beyond belief at whatever entity’s been wearing his face and making Cas look this gutted. “I did not jailbreak Heaven and lie to Naomi’s face just for you to sit here and not believe me. It’s me, you’re coming with me, end of story. You’ve just gotta suck it up and deal.” 

Something changes in Cas’s face. 

His eyebrows raise, eyes widen, and he sounds almost afraid as he whispers, “Dean?”

Dean could cry from relief. “ _Yes_ , man, that’s why I’ve been saying.” 

“It’s really you? I thought,” he cuts himself off. “So that was you, praying?”

Dean’s abruptly glad he bit his tongue as he was praying, didn’t confess all the things that came to mind. “You heard that, huh?”

“Yes, but I didn’t— I wondered, maybe, at one point. But I couldn’t let myself believe it.”

It hits Dean with a cold, absolute certainty, what he said that made Cas think maybe it was the real Dean instead of some bullshit torment — the same thing that just broke through to him. When he got angry; when he yelled at his memory of Cas into the darkness. The Empty pretended to be him and said nice things, and Cas didn’t believe it, and he knew it was really Dean when he shouted. Something bitter clenches sharply in his stomach as an echo comes back to him from decades ago: facing a demon wearing his father's face and knowing it to be a lie because it wasn’t angry enough at him. 

The guilt twisting around his ribs is almost a physical pain.

He meets Cas’s eyes and knows they understand each other by the way Cas’s eyes widen, round and sad.

“Dean, it’s not—”

“It’s okay, Cas. It’s fine. Let’s just get out of here, okay?” 

He turns away; there’s nothing to turn to, and the yawning blackness presses in on him. Even having Cas out of his sight for a moment is enough for the panic to rise in his chest and he spins back, abruptly afraid that Cas will be gone and he’ll be alone again. 

He lets out a shaky breath when Cas is still there, rumpled and worried and solid. 

Cas sees his panic and steps closer to put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Dean, I’m here.” 

Cas is _here_. He’s real, and standing in front of Dean, touching Dean, looking in his eyes, and — well, not alive, but Dean’s in a glass house on that one and anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter much —

Dean moves, and Cas moves at the same time, and they’re hugging, Dean clutching him so tightly he’s glad for Cas’s angel strength. Cas is warm against him, and somehow he smells the same, and he gives as good as he gets — wrapping Dean in his arms, large hands pressing so tightly against Dean’s side and back that he feels their heat through his jacket. 

He murmurs Dean’s name against his neck.

One of them is shaking. Maybe they both are. Dean’s not sure.

Dean buries his face into where Cas’s shoulder meets his neck, feeling the same stupid scratchy trenchcoat fabric he’s touched a hundred times.

Cas’s hand comes up to cradle Dean’s head, long fingers stroking into his hair, holding him close and precious as they breathe together. 

“Cas,” he says, shaky. His mouth is so dry he has to swallow; licks his lips, nervous. Here, in Cas’s arms, he can shut out the horror of the hostile darkness around them. It doesn’t matter where they are — he’s safe here. He’s protected. He’s where he belongs. 

“Cas, listen,” he starts again, quiet against Cas’s neck. “When you summoned the Empty, you didn’t give me time to react. And I think — I think you had in your head what I would have said.”

“Dean, you don’t have to—” Cas says, tension in his voice, and Dean feels his muscles move like he’s about to pull away. 

Dean won’t — can’t — let him, pulling him in tighter and cutting him off. “Shh, Cas, wait— just, just listen, okay? Just let me say this.” He smooths one hand up and down Cas’s back like he’s soothing a skittish horse. 

“When we met, the first time. The real first time — not in that barn, but when you dragged me outta hell. It was just — blood, and bone, and pain, and then there was this, this light. It was so good, so — I don’t know, righteous — that I thought it would destroy me. Because I was a monster, Cas. I was a monster, and you saw me, and you saw good in me.”

“I didn’t know you remembered that,” Cas says, quiet. 

“Yeah,” Dean says. He’s never told anyone this, the most private part of his soul. “It was the last hell memory to come back to me. But that’s who you are, this, this celestial force of good. I could never forget it. I mean, you look like a CPA who’s running late to work, but you’re not—”

“Not human?”

“Not something that could love a guy like me.” 

Cas’s voice is fierce. “You are the best man I know, Dean. Human or angel.”

Dean’s heart feels like it’s going to leap out his throat. He’s on the precipice here, putting all his chips in. “I thought— there were a few times when I wondered. When I could let myself think maybe you’d fallen low enough, become human enough, that you maybe could see me in a different light,” he admits lowly. “And don’t get me wrong, I tried to introduce you to all sorts of human pleasures. Hell, you know I took a lotta joy in it, tempting you towards humanity. But I wasn’t — I couldn’t —” he fumbles for the words. 

“Cas, how could you expect me to think you’d want. That you’d want me. The same way—”

Cas is quiet. Dean feels the tension in his body, pulled taut like a guitar string.

Dean’s breath is shaky, so shaky, and his heart is racing because — this next part. This is the part that matters.

“The same way I’ve wanted you for years.” 

Cas pulls back now, and Dean feels the absence of him like a loss even as he takes Dean by the shoulders, faces close, to look in his eyes. Cas’s gaze is wide, searching, and Dean is so vulnerable, so open, that he thinks Cas must be able to see everything on his face. But then again, that’s always their problem — they both thought they could read each other better than they actually could. 

“Dean. What are you saying?” 

All or nothing. “I’m saying, Cas. _Castiel_. I’m in love with you. Have been for ages, you idiot.” 

Cards are on the table. No taking it back. He’s calm, calmer than he thought he’d be, like just saying it out loud has settled something into place in his chest. 

Cas’s face opens up, stunned, disbelief or hope or both in his wide eyes. An impossibly old, powerful celestial being who’s seen the birth of stars and shaped life in his hands and here he is, knocked completely out of orbit by Dean, of all people.

“Dean,” he says. “Tell me this is real.”

“This is real, Cas. It’s me. I’m still an asshole with anger issues and, y’know, I’m dead now, but,” he flushes, says it anyway. “I’m yours. If that’s still on the table.” 

“You’re mine,” Cas says, wondering, like he’s processing the shape of the words on his tongue. 

And that — hell, that does something to Dean. Heat sparks at the base of his spine and spills upward, warmth pooling in his chest, and his breath comes shallow. Cas’s hands are still on his shoulders and Dean reaches up, wraps his hands around Cas’s wrists.

He traces one thumb, gentle, over Cas’s wrist bone. Cas’s eyes are wide, impossibly blue. His fingers tighten against Dean’s shoulders. It took them a decade, more than a decade to get here.

Dean breathes out, slow, and Cas hitches a breath in, and they’re so close—

When they kiss, it’s like coming home.

It’s soft, chaste, just pressure, and Dean’s heart locks into place like the chamber of a gun.

“ _Dean_ ,” Cas murmurs against his lips, and Dean answers with his hands, moving from Cas’s wrists to his jaw, the sides of his face, anchoring his soul with his fingers in Cas’s hair. 

He can’t stop kissing Cas. It’s slow, easy — and then he runs a thumb along Cas’s cheekbone, and feels Cas shiver against him, and suddenly Cas is _wild_ , fierce, kissing the hell out of him like he’s righteous fury come to raise Dean out of hell all over again. It’s not chaste anymore, it’s years and years of wanting and missed moments and overheard prayers come to bear in hands and lips and tongues and heat. Dean’s overwhelmed, his entire world narrowed to the points of contact between them. He tightens his grip in Cas’s hair and Cas’s breath comes as a gasp, and Dean has to pull away to catch his own. 

He presses his forehead against Cas’s and they breathe, shaky, together. 

When he pulls back, just a little, to look at Cas, he’d be genuinely worried for his own heart, if he weren’t already dead, from the way love is a tangible pressure swelling in his chest. 

Cas’s eyes are bright and his hair messy from Dean’s hands, looking like he did ten years ago. Dean can’t stop smiling. Every breath is half laughter and he thinks he must look like a goddamn idiot, catching his breath here in the least romantic place in the universe, but it fits. He met Cas in hell, fell in love with him in Purgatory, so sure, this might as well happen here. 

He pulls Cas back in for another hug, not trusting himself with what might happen if they start kissing again, but desperate for more physical contact. They’ve just kissed once and he’s already greedy for it — years of holding himself back from touching Cas, keeping his traitorous hands at his side except when he couldn’t control himself. Now he’s had a taste, one sip of whiskey for the alcoholic and all those years of sobriety mean nothing anymore. He’ll drink the whole bottle and ask for more. 

He presses a kiss into Cas’s hair.  From this vantage point, his eye is caught again by the moving, living darkness. 

It sobers him, fast.

“Okay,” he says, out loud, trying to settle himself. They’re not out of the woods yet. “Let’s get outta here.”

“About that,” Cas says, pulling away. Reluctantly, Dean lets him go. “What’s the plan?”

“This is kind of a make it up as we go plan,” Dean admits.

Cas gets the wrinkle between his eyebrows that tends to show up when Dean does something stupid. Dean loves it. “Dean, you— did you just come here without any idea how you’d get out?” 

“You know me,” Dean says, grinning wide. “I’m great at improvising. And hey, two minds are better than one, right?”

Fear crosses Cas’s face and for a second he looks like he did when Dean first found him here. “Dean, there’s no way out. You trapped yourself here.”

“I could help,” says another voice.

Dean turns. “ _Jack_ ,” he says, grinning. “Kid, it’s so good to see you.”

“Dean,” Cas says, low. There’s a warning in his voice. 

Jack tilts his head, considering. “I _could_ help. But Dean, why would you want to get out of here with me?”

“What do you mean? Course I want that. Sam’ll be so happy to see you again.”

“But you think I belong here. You wanted me dead, after all.” Jack’s voice is guileless, eyes wide as he looks at Dean. Dean’s stomach drops. 

“Dean, it’s not him,” Cas says, grabbing the sleeve of Dean’s jacket. 

“You tried to kill me,” Jack says. “You said I was your son, and then you pulled a gun on me.” 

Before Dean’s horrified eyes, a red mark appears on his shirt, in the center of his chest. It spreads rapidly, soaking the fabric with blood, pouring down his shirt and dripping to the darkness beneath his feet. 

“Is this what you wanted, Dean? Or this?” A hole appears in the center of his forehead, like a gunshot wound, blood pouring down his face. 

Dean is transfixed, mute with horror, jaw working helplessly as he stares at Jack’s ruined face.

“ _DEAN!”_ Cas shouts in his ear, grabbing the sides of his face, stepping in front of him so Dean’s whole field of vision is just Cas’s worried face, blocking out the horrifying sight behind him. “Listen to me,” he says, urgent. “It’s not Jack. It’s the entity that lives here, that controls this place. It can look like anyone, it uses your memories. Dean, that’s not Jack.” 

Dean closes his eyes, swallows hard against the bile rising in his throat. _It’s not Jack. But nothing it said was a lie._

“Oops,” it says from behind Cas, sounding unapologetic. Its voice is different now, no longer an imitation of Jack’s but something twisted, more alien. “Couldn’t help myself. So fun to have new toys to play with, hmm. Oh, we’re all going to have lots of fun here, now that you’re both stuck with me.” 

Dean meets Cas’s eyes and sees his own fear reflected back at him. 

Maybe coming here without an exit strategy wasn’t the best idea. Maybe he just made everything a lot worse. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I refuse to write plot ever again, all I want is to write them being soft with each other. Most of the rest is written now, though!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: as with chapter 2, dean's death and the undercurrent of potential suicidal ideation is discussed here.

Seeing Jack’s face again, covered in blood, is a dagger in Dean’s stomach. 

“Focus on me, Dean,” Cas says, one hand on his shoulder as they turn to face the entity together. “It’s not actually him. Jack’s okay.” He pauses. “Well, you’d have to tell me that, actually.” 

“He is,” he says, quiet, just to Cas. “Jack— he saved the world. He’s amazing. He absorbed Chuck’s power, so he’s kind of, uh, God now?” 

He looks to the side to see Cas look down, a small, private smile on his face, glowing with pride. Despite everything, Dean thinks _god he’s beautiful._

“I’m here for Cas,” Dean says to the entity. “We’re leaving.” 

He can’t look at the thing wearing Jack’s shape as it laughs, maniacal. 

“And you think I’m just, what, going to let you sail out of here with him? With my favorite pet? Castiel here, your _pal_ , your _buddy_ , he’s the one who got away. He pestered and bothered and slithered and fought just so he could get back to you and then. And then! I snatched him right back up. Castiel isn’t going _anywhere_. And now that you’re here, neither are you.”

“Remember, it’s not actually him,” Cas murmurs in his ear again. 

Despair twists its fingers in Dean’s gut but he pushes the fear down ruthlessly. Like hell is he giving up without a fight. 

He takes a gamble. “You sure about that? Seems like your whole situation here isn’t going so well.” 

He’d thought it was probably 50-50 whether the whole explosion-of-power-leeching-into-Heaven thing was a good or bad thing for this creature. By the way it freezes, restless movements abruptly going still, he knows he guessed right, and he presses his advantage. “If you think it’s bad here, buddy, you should see what’s going on in Heaven. This isn’t going to go well for you.”

“Oh, but it’s going to go even worse for—”

And then Cas looks up, sharply. “Wait,” he cuts off the entity’s sneering, holding up a dismissive hand in its direction and looking at Dean. “You were in Heaven?”

Dean’s taken aback, and something in Cas’s tone makes him wary. “Well, yeah. Better that than the alternative.”

Cas narrows his eyes. “When you said you were dead, you meant — actually dead?”

There’s a pause as Dean tries to figure out what to say, baffled by the change of subject. Behind Cas, the entity moves, circling them with movements that are too fluid to be human. 

“Yes?” he says, finally. “I don’t know what either kind of dead there is, man.” 

“How long?” Cas asks, fierce.

“What?”

“You look the same as when I saw you last. You haven’t aged. And I don’t think my own memories would be altering my perception of you, not here.” He leans in, steel in his eyes. “So how long did you live after I said goodbye to you?”

Dean glances over at the entity, at the moving darkness beyond it, and back to Cas. “Cas, buddy, is this really the time?”

And it’s not an answer, but it very clearly answers Cas’s question from the way he exhales through his teeth. “Damnit, Dean. You were supposed to have a long life.”

Yeah, that one hits. Because Dean had thought, expected, imagined for his entire life that he’d die young and bloody, to the point that a tulpa probably could have scripted his whole ending based on the sheer power of thought. If your whole life is the fight, the fight’s gotta end when it beats you — doesn’t matter that his record was flawless til then (well, he’s not sure how to count the previous deaths). If you win a thousand times and you get beat once, that’s it. It was _decades_ before Dean even thought hey, maybe the fight ends when I get out of the ring, and even longer before he could entertain that thought without being consumed by guilt. 

He’s pretty sure Cas, standing there glaring at him for dying young — eh, young-ish — is the first time anyone ever told him they expected a different end for him than a blade or a bullet. 

And here’s the other thing: Dean never even thought about that, about getting out and staying out, about retirement, til Cas came in the picture anyway. It wasn’t like he met Cas and the next day he was looking at AARP benefits or anything, but like a picture slowly coming into focus, by the time he started seeing something that looked like _after,_ Cas was always right there with him and Sam. 

So, yeah, he’s not going to take this kind of judgment from someone who had the audacity to make him imagine a future in the first place only to bow out once the image was too close to real to get out of his head. 

“What, like you’re one to talk? Self-sacrificing, much?” he scoffs right back at Cas.

“Dean, I did that _for_ you. So you could live, not—” Cas narrows his eyes even further, “what, throw yourself into a vampire nest? Or was it demons?”

“This is _very_ touching,” the entity sneers. Both of them wave a hand in its direction, neither breaking eye contact. “Enough,” Cas says sharply at the same moment Dean barks, “Hold on.” 

He doesn’t wait for it to react, all the frustration and grief he spent weeks choking on in the aftermath of Cas’s death — everything that got taken away from him in Stepford-Heaven — boiling up to the surface.

“Oh, so you’re allowed to be pissed at me for a hunt going bad, but I can’t be pissed at you for _killing yourself_ for me? Nice hypocrisy there, Cas.” 

“Yes, and what _exactly_ was the point of my sacrifice if you were just going to throw it away recklessly, Dean? Did you even make it a year?”

“You tell me, Cas, what’s the point of a long life if you weren’t there for it?”

_Oh fuck_ , Dean thinks the moment the words come out of his mouth. 

That’s showing all his cards, opening up his veins, exposing things that are so used to living in darkness that they shrink away from the light as soon as the words hit the air. 

It’s too much, way too much, and he can tell Cas is shocked by the way his mouth works for a second like he doesn’t know how to react. Dean can’t let him respond, more terrified of what Cas might say than of anything else in this situation, Eldritch horror and hostile afterlife included. 

He knows there’s no dignity in the way he turns away from Cas and back to the leering entity. 

“It doesn’t matter. We’re getting out of here. I know this place must be collapsing, and you’re gonna let us out so we can fix it.” His voice is rough and his poker face is probably shot to hell. Cas doesn’t say anything, at least, but Dean can feel his stare on the side of his face and it makes his cheeks burn. 

“Oh, is that right,” the entity says. “You’re going to _fix_ our little…hmm…structural integrity dilemma, are you? Big hero act, save us all?”

And that’s confirmation, right there, that whatever’s going wrong here actually is doing a number on this entity. Dean hadn’t been sure, before, but this he can use. 

“That’s right,” Dean says with all of the confidence he absolutely does not feel. Hell, he successfully bullshitted this story to Naomi already, might as well go double or nothing. “The whole reason I came here in the first place was that the angels have a plan to fix this. Just had to get Cas out first, then we’re putting everything in order.”

“Dean, Dean, Dean,” it says, contorting Jack’s face into a skull-like grin. “I like the chutzpah. But, you see, lying isn’t allowed. I can see right into that pretty pretty brain of yours and mm, there is so much in there to see, but here’s what there _isn’t_.” Its mouth works, barely-controlled fury lacing its words. “There _isn’t_ a plan to do anything of the sort.”

Shit. 

Dean hadn’t realized how extensive its mind reading ability was. So, lying to it — his only play — turns out to be useless. He watches an ugly sneer cross its face as it hears him react mentally to it calling his bluff. 

“Actually,” Cas speaks up again, laser focus finally moving off Dean and back to the entity. “There might be.”

It cocks its head, a nightmare echo of the real Jack’s mannerisms.

“Dean, you said Jack absorbed Chuck’s powers?” Cas asks him. 

“All of them,” Dean says.

“And Amara’s too?”

Dean hadn’t thought of that before, but — “He must have, yeah.” 

“That would make him more powerful than anything,” Cas concludes, quietly triumphant. “With dominion over the light and the darkness. If anything can set this right, it’s him. But you need us to get to him.”

It snorts rudely. “So there’s a new God, same as the old God. Whoop-de-doo. God can’t reach here. He’s never been able to reach here. A god is a god is a God.” 

And it’s like they’re on a hunt together, plan gone sideways but Dean has always been able to read Cas’s moves, back him up without any communication. He can see the shape of Cas’s play. “Except Jack reached here before,” he points out, thinking of the glowing light of a pay phone and an open wound in his soul healing like it was touched by grace. 

Cas’s voice is dry as he adds, an aside to the entity, “You might recall that.” The thing gives him a long glare, whole body twitching, and Dean wonders briefly what exactly went down the last time Cas came back to life.

“If your precious boy-God is so powerful, then why hasn’t he done something already, hm? Why would he leave you here?” It straightens, blood and wounds vanishing from Jack’s features, and suddenly he’s the spitting image of their son, regarding them with wide eyes. “Maybe I just don’t love you. After all, you aren’t my real father.”

If Dean wasn’t standing so close to Cas, he wouldn’t have been able to feel the tremble that runs through him. Heedless of their earlier argument, he moves his hand just an inch to press against the back of Cas’s.

And Dean knows that Jack’s absence has got nothing to do with what the thing is implying. Regardless of how bad things had gone at their darkest moments, there’s not a doubt in his mind that Jack loved Cas, considered him his real father. So he really, really hopes this is the answer, because the alternative — that something had _happened,_ all that power burning up inside him _—_ is too painful to consider: “He said he’d be hands-off. He wasn’t going to interfere.” 

“Free will,” Cas says, and a ghost of a smile crosses his face. 

Dean feels the momentum building, just a little bit. Like maybe there’s something that could resemble a sliver of a chance of hope. Before the thing has a chance to respond, he throws in his last argument: “Plus, you know, you’re not isolated here anymore. I got here straight from Heaven. Apparently one does just stroll into Mordor. Jack could do it easy.” 

“Read my mind,” Cas says, no hesitation in his voice. “You know I’m not lying. This is your best chance of getting some quiet.”

It looks furious. The movement of the darkness around them is more noticeable, picking up speed as though responding to the entity’s agitation. 

Dean can’t help but hold his breath. 

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, it squints at Cas. “If this doesn’t work, I’m coming back for you. For good this time. You know the saying, fool me twice, enjoy never-ending torment.” 

“Fine,” Cas says, before Dean can say anything. Before Dean can do something like tell the entity to hell with that, to take him in Cas’s place if this goes wrong. From the look Cas slants over at him, Dean figures Cas has a pretty good sense of what’s going through his head.

"No, no. I'm coming for _both_ of you," it says, knowing exactly what Dean's thinking. "Ante up this time, boys." 

"Fine," Dean barks, and now it's Cas's turn to glare at him. Yeah, like _hell_ he'd let Cas get sucked away to eternal torture again alone. 

The entity nods. “I’m sure I’ll see you soon,” it sneers, and flicks a hand at them in a dismissive gesture. 

And then — it turns away.

There’s a low pressure, like Dean’s being pulled backwards. Except it’s not backwards, it’s _out._ He can feel his body reacting, reaching towards freedom as the darkness moves around him and he lets out his breath slowly. 

Is that it? Did they just talk themselves out of this?

He looks over at Cas in disbelief and sees the same desperate hope echoed there. Cas’s lips are just pulling up faintly at the corners, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to smile but he can’t quite hold it back anyway. 

The darkness fluctuates around them as the pull gets stronger, and Dean’s not sure if it’s his imagination or if it’s starting to get lighter. 

It’s the same second that his brain finally says _son of a bitch, i think we did it_ that the thing shaped like Jack turns back around. 

The grin on its face is horrific as it says, casually, “You know, I don’t think it takes two to tango. You don’t mind me keeping a little insurance, do you boys?”

And the moving crawling blackness is surging forward, rushing towards them. 

No, not towards _them_ —it’s coming for _Cas_ , oily fingers wrapping around his legs. It’s a double image in Dean’s eyes, this moment overlaid with the last time he saw this, the last time Cas was taken from him, and now it’s happening again. The pressure on him now is overwhelming, pulling him out, freezing his body in place and he can only meet Cas’s eyes, widened in shock.

“ _No!”_ Dean gasps. With all the strength in his body he forces one arm forward, out. 

As an impossible force pulls him away, as the darkness surges up to claim Cas, he reaches out and grasps his shoulder. 

At the contact, something warm and gold sings deep inside him, an echo of sensation ghosting across his own shoulder and the corresponding place on his soul. 

But the pressure is so great, and he can’t hold on —

_I’m gonna lose him —_

And Cas’s hand comes up, wraps around his wrist and grips him tight. 

It _burns,_ tendrils of darkness pushing between them, a hideous emptiness that burns cold like dry ice screaming at the contact, as the Empty refuses to give up its claim. Every nerve in his wrist where Cas touches him is on fire, pain so deep that he thinks dizzily it must be searing into his actual soul, not just his skin.

The pain is unthinkable, unbearable.

But Dean has lost Cas before. He knows what unbearable feels like.

This pain is nothing next to that.

The golden warmth in Dean burns brighter, scorching hot, and he’s not sure if it’s delirium from the pain or if the two of them are actually ringed in gold light — fuck, he’s really losing his grip on reality, and he only knows one thing:

_Don’t let go._

_Don’t let go._

_Don’t let go._

There’s a roaring in his ears, vision going dark, and he’s so terrified but the only thing, the _only_ thing is to hold on.

It’s like pulling himself out of Purgatory except this time, Cas isn’t letting him go, Cas is holding on so tight that the pressure, the pain, is almost too much to bear but Dean needs more of it, wants to pull Cas into his very body, let him possess him, let his grace burrow along Dean’s bones if it means not letting go—

He sees Cas’s face go slack, terror is ice in his chest, the pressure is too much—

And then everything is white.

* * *

The first conscious thought that crosses Dean’s mind comes like a cloud drifting across an empty sky: 

_what happens if you die when you’re already dead?_

Synapses fried from the pain and pressure, his thoughts spiral aimlessly: 

_is that like double jeopardy_

_does it cancel out and I get reborn_

_it sure would be weird to be a baby_

_what does baby food taste like_

Finally, his brain reboots. 

His nervous system comes back online and he’s flooded with sensation, with sensory input.

First: the nerves in his wrist are screaming at him. Something burned into the skin around his forearm. But that’s fine, that’s just physical pain. He’ll deal with it later.

As he blinks, he realizes the white in his vision is shiny, a hard surface, instead of the blankness of some kind of double afterlife. Okay, he thinks to himself, like he’s explaining something to a very young child. You’re on your knees, and you’re looking at a white floor. 

With effort, he looks up. And there’s Sam, and Charlie, and what’s-her-name, the other angel, staring at him. It slots back into place, now: he’s back in Heaven. He’s in the same room where he first crossed over to the Empty. Traces of the crawling darkness stretch alongside him, reaching towards the front of the room, but the movement is slow, somehow resigned. 

Their mouths are moving, so they must be talking, but Dean can’t hear it over the sound of his heartbeat echoing in his ears. He needs to look to his side but he’s paralyzed with fear.

If he sees an empty floor, an emptiness where Cas was, he’s not sure he has it in him to come back from that. 

He can’t look. He has to look.

He turns. 

And there, just behind him, closer to the darkness but still wholly, fully in Heaven with him, is Cas. 

He’s pushing himself up from the floor, looking just as overwhelmed as Dean feels. 

Their eyes meet, and it’s like the pressure _pops._ Like swallowing at high altitude, sound rushing back in and a simple, sudden relief.

His hands are on Cas before his brain gives them permission to, clutching at the lapels of his trenchcoat, pulling him up and scrambling away from the darkness at the back of the room. Which isn’t doing anything other than pulsing mutinously behind them, but Dean can’t take another second of seeing Cas surrounded by darkness. 

He shoots out an arm to shepherd Sam and Charlie out on autopilot, the whole motley crew spilling out of the room, Sam and Charlie asking questions that Dean doesn’t have anything close to the energy to answer yet.

The only thing he can do is meet Cas’s eyes. 

The other angel shuts the door firmly behind her and Dean lets out a long breath at the quiet click of it; the finality, even if it’s just a door, of having something between him and Cas and that awful place. 

Like the door closing released something, he suddenly can’t stop grinning, every breath coming out as a hitch of laughter — so relieved he’s delirious with it. After a beat, Cas is grinning back at him so wide it wrinkles his nose, and Dean, hyper conscious of their audience, still can’t stop himself from reeling Cas in for a desperate hug. Cas clutches him tightly, every point of contact a physical reminder of their freedom. Dean’s wrist is raw where it scrapes against the trenchcoat, and the hand he clutched Cas’s shoulder with is so weak he can hardly even grasp at Cas’s jacket with it, and the way Cas has him wrapped up is just tight enough to be uncomfortable, and he can’t stop his breath from hitching on little laughing gasps. 

There’s still a sword over their heads, sure. But Dean’s gonna give himself a full five minutes to just be really fucking happy about this.

+

“Are you _kidding me,_ Dean?”

Right, Dean thinks. Maybe he should have expected that Sam would have a less-than-pleased reaction to the idea that Dean made a deal with yet another evil entity. Honestly, though, he hasn’t done that in years so Sam’s bitch fit is kind of an overreaction. He’s mostly kicked the selling-his-soul habit. Sam should give him more credit.

“I _just_ got to see you again after decades, Dean, _decades_. Do you know what that was like? And then you walk into the Empty and I wasn’t sure you were _ever_ coming back, and now you’re telling me this thing has a claim on your soul if you can’t—“

Dean tunes out Sam. He’s learned from experience to just let Sam ride out his head of steam until he can be reasonable again. 

Besides, he’s distracted by the fact that Cas is standing _right there,_ alive — or, well, whatever, that doesn’t seem to matter anymore — and mostly well. 

It might be a trick of the light, the way his lips look just slightly redder than usual, but Dean can’t look at them without thinking _I did that._ He finds himself in this weird game of chicken where he stares at Cas until Cas feels the eye contact and looks over at him, at which point Dean, totally subtle and cool about it, immediately looks away to stop himself from going totally red until he sees Cas move in his periphery, at which point he can’t stop himself from looking again. Rinse and repeat. 

Jesus, he thinks. I _am_ a teenage girl.

He is saved from total and complete embarrassment by Charlie, who has been looking between the three of them like she wishes she had some popcorn, and who finally steps in front of Sam and claps her hands in his face. 

Sam blinks and snaps his mouth shut.

“Dude, I’m right there with you, Dean’s an idiot,” she says.

“Hey!—” Dean interjects.

“—but,” she goes on smoothly, “we’ve only got so much time to figure this out before either the Empty or Naomi comes back. So let’s save the big speeches, shall we?”

In the corner of his eye, Dean sees Cas go abruptly still at the name. He looks over, but Cas is already turning from Charlie to look at him. When their eyes meet, Dean sees a haunted look on Cas’s face that he’s seen before but never quite understood.

“That goes for you two also, by the way,” Charlie adds, tapping Dean’s chest with one hand and Cas’s with the other. “You can continue your silent re-enactment of Pride & Prejudice later. We’ve got a world to save, people, let’s get it together!”

It’s not common that all three of them are completely lost for words, but you could honest-to-god hear a pin drop in the endless room of filing cabinets when she finishes. 

Sam’s mouth is twisting like he’s not sure if he had finished being angry at Dean before moving on to laughing at him. Dean, meanwhile, is pretty sure his face is redder than Charlie’s hair, and he very pointedly avoids eye contact with Cas.

“So Dean told me that Jack absorbed God’s powers and then left,” Cas ventures at last.

Someone who didn’t know him as well as Dean does would think he was totally unruffled by Charlie’s comment. Dean, whose primary hobby for the last 12 years of his life was ruffling Cas’s feathers, notes with distant satisfaction the way his shoulders are a fraction of an inch higher than normal and his eyes shift in telltale embarrassment.

“Right,” Sam says, and the humor has gone out of his eyes. “The last time I ever saw him was right after we defeated Chuck. Like I said earlier, I prayed after — after I lost you, Dean, but,” he shakes his head. “There was never any answer.” 

“You said he was trying to be hands off, but I can’t imagine any kid of yours would be okay with Heaven collapsing,” Charlie says, with a very broad hand gesture on _yours_. 

“Are you thinking he doesn’t know what’s up?” Dean asks, frowning. “Cas, do you think that’s possible?”

“It’s hard to say,” Cas says. “We know Chuck was omniscient, but not omnipotent. There are clearly limits to his power.”

“If he does know and this really is some kind of hands-off move, we gotta talk to him face-to-face about it,” Dean says, thinking _he might be all powerful but he’s still just a kid. Letting Heaven collapse is totally grounds for a time-out._

“There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know for sure, but it could help us,” Sam starts slowly. “Cas — Naomi told us about how all the souls are kept apart from each other.” 

Cas cocks his head, thoughtful. “We were told it was because one man’s heaven was another’s hell. That the personalized isolation was what made it paradise.” 

With the strained look of a man reconciling the lies he was told with the truth he now knows, he adds, “Of course, that can’t be true. Paradise is being with the people you love.” And he just — looks at Dean.

It’s no different than a thousand times before, but now. Now it’s out there for both of them. When he meets Cas’s steady gaze, he knows they’re on the same page, finally, and he’s sure that Cas can read the love in his eyes as clearly as he sees it in Cas’s. He has to swallow before he says something truly embarrassing — Sam and Charlie are standing right there and he has some dignity to maintain, after all. (Okay, yeah, if they’re seeing the teenage-girl smitten look on his face he’s probably fresh out of dignity anyway). 

All he trusts himself to say is, “Cas.”

When he looks away from Cas back to Sam, Sam’s biting down a grin, like he knows _exactly_ what’s not being said. Thankfully, he doesn’t comment — just continues the conversation as though there wasn’t a deeply awkward pause.

“Yeah, it turns out that the real reason Heaven’s all individualized is because they’re afraid of what would happen if too many souls were in one place.”

Dean snorts. “They just don’t want to lose control.”

Cas traces a long finger along the edge of the filing cabinet. “It wasn’t always like that, you know. Early humans shared a single realm of Heaven with the other species. It was sometime after Lucifer's Fall that we were told there would be a restructuring, as humans were becoming too numerous and developing such complex memories and tastes.”

“Okay, but get this,” Sam says, and it’s so familiar Dean almost chokes. “If you think about one soul sending up one prayer, versus two souls sending up the same prayer at the same time, that would be more powerful, right?”

“Exponentially so, yes,” Cas nods. “It’s not a linear function.”

Sam brushes his hair out of his face and starts talking faster, the way he does when he’s excited. “So if we get a bunch of people together here and we have them all pray to Jack, or — i don’t know, use the power of their souls together to send up one prayer…”

“We could DDOS attack him,” Charlie finishes, grinning.

“It’s not an actual attack,” Dean says as an aside to Cas, before he has a chance to say anything — his head had tilted a fraction of an inch and Dean knew what that meant. If he has Cas’s head tilts catalogued in his head, no he doesn’t. That would be ridiculous.

“Exactly,” Sam confirms to Charlie. “Cas, do you think it would work?”

“To get his attention?” Cas hums, thoughtful. “I don’t know. He’d have to be listening, certainly, and I don’t know the limits of his new power. But it would certainly be extraordinarily powerful. If anything could, that would be it.”

Dean knocks his knuckles against the filing cabinets. “What do you think Naomi would do to us if we started a mass jailbreak?”

There’s something intense, even angry in Cas’s eyes as he meets Dean’s. “I don’t have to imagine.” Dean looks at the set of his jaw and realizes suddenly that there’s a hell of a lot about Cas he doesn’t know. Because there’s no way _that_ tone in his voice doesn’t mean something. 

There’s a silence in the room for a second; the furious evenness in Cas’s voice had clearly startled everyone.

Sam finally clears his throat, looking over in the distance where the angel Iridiel is looking bored. “Should we tell them what we’re thinking, then?”

“My vote is for pushing our luck,” Charlie offers. “Just keep going til they start getting twitchy, and get whatever we need set up in advance so we can press play before they intervene.”

“I’m with her,” Dean says, avoiding Cas’s eyes. “If this is our best shot at getting me and Cas free of the Empty, we gotta go for it.”

Cas purses his lips. Finally, he says slowly, “Someone once taught me it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. I think that applies here.”

Current circumstances forgotten for the moment, Dean grins wide. This was _not_ the situation he had in mind when he told Cas that sure, he should steal Sam’s green smoothies if he wanted, he could ask forgiveness later. But hell, it’s not like Cas ever made a habit of asking for permission in the first place anyway. Dean can’t entirely be blamed for turning him into a monster. 

“Alright, we’re doing this,” Sam says, final.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more chapter here! thank you so much for your kudos and comments so far, they bring me so much joy.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Endings and beginnings.

Independently, Pamela and Missouri both terrify Dean. He realizes too late, as Cas retrieves their souls, that together they are going to be an absolute _nightmare._

Sure enough, once hugs have been distributed and Sam’s brought them up to speed, there’s a moment when they both fix their eyes on him, look at each other, and look back at him. Oh yeah, he hates this.

“Don’t be rude,” Missouri says. 

“I was just going to say I’m happy for you,” Pamela adds, all innocent like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Though you might want to watch your eyes around that one, hm?”

Dean glances over at Cas, who’s currently trying to do his best impression of being part of the filing cabinet. He looks guilty every time his eyes fall on Pamela. 

“I _am_ sorry,” he says for the third time. 

“Oh, it’s fine,” Pamela waves a hand. “Hind _sight_ is 20-20, right?”

The emphasis on sight is audible, and Cas cringes harder as Pamela cackles.

“Sweetheart?” Missouri calls over to Iridiel, who glares at them all as she gets closer. “We’ll need some supplies. Could we get some candles and three feathers from an ostrich?”

“And a quartz crystal,” Pamela adds. “The larger the better.”

Cas is the only angel Dean has met that actually knows how to roll their eyes, but Iridiel comes close before she leaves the room.

“Crystals?” he asks skeptically. “What’s all that for?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Pamela explains. 

“I just don’t like that angel much,” Missouri adds. “And I figure you won’t want an audience when you spring open these cells.”

\+ 

It turns out it’s a remarkably simple thing to channel psychic energy through one person. The plan is almost too easy: sigil on the door to keep the angels out, jailbreak a few dozen Heavens, and get a team prayer going with Sam as a kind of lightning rod to focus the energy, psychically channeled by Pamela and Missouri.

The hardest part, for Dean, is swallowing back the sour taste in his mouth as he says, no questions asked, that it should be Sam who makes the call. Sam’s relationship with Jack was always cleaner than his, more simple and sweet than Dean’s complicated, violent attempt at fatherhood. Cas, who never once doubted Jack the way they did, removes himself from consideration right away regardless. (“Angels don’t have souls. No one hears our prayers,” he says calmly, breaking Dean’s heart a little bit.)

He knows it’s only a matter of time before Naomi hears what’s going on — he got the sense that she’s got a lot on her plate, but there’s no way she won’t come running when all the Heavens start breaking. The sigil Cas painted on the door won’t hold them out forever, and there’s a painful twist in Dean’s heart at how familiar the situation is.

So yeah, he gets the urgency here. There’s no time to freeze up. 

But it’s hard to remember that when Cas returns, leading a group of what feels like everyone he ever cared about on earth. 

He hadn’t thought about it — making the call to only retrieve hunters, allies, people they could trust not to freak out about the situation was the right strategic move.

But it’s nothing like the experience of coming face to face with them, with Bobby and Ellen and Jo and Kevin and so many more, hunters he hasn’t seen in years. People he loved, people he failed. People whose bodies he burned. 

There’s his _mom_ , stepping out from behind Annie Hawkins, and Dean’s knees go weak.

Sam’s already launched himself into the middle of the group, doling out teary hugs left and right, but Dean feels frozen. There’s an ache in his chest, something tensing in the back of his mind that says _no._

A dark fearful whisper deep in his brain, born of decades of experience, that says _you can’t have all this, Dean, you never get this much good at once._

He looks at Sam and Cas and his mother and pretty much everyone he ever cared about, in one place, and his heart twists in — he thinks _fear_ at first, but then he hears an echo of Cas’s words.

_Everything you have ever done, you have done for love_.

And it’s like a lightbulb moment for him, which — yeah, kind of embarrassing that he never put this together before, that he never realized the terror and fear and rage that kept him fighting all those years may have been the bullets but it was something else firing the rounds. 

_Love_ , he thinks, and it comes easier than he ever thought it could.

He’s been silent and still for long enough that the cluster of hunters is on him before he has time to move. 

“Y’okay there, boy?” Bobby asks, and Dean’s face actually hurts with how wide his answering grin is. He reels Bobby in for a hug, the smell of whiskey and oil on his flannel so familiar Dean has to blink back a sudden prickle in his eyes. 

It’s a blur of greetings and hugs — he claps a hand on Ketch’s shoulder, presses a kiss to Jo’s hair, side-steps where Sam is visibly shrinking as he tries to explain what’s going on to Rufus. 

Then his mom is right in front of him. His _real_ mom, not the happy housewife version that was fabricated from his memories at age 4, but the real one, tough and sarcastic and complicated. He’s abruptly so goddamn glad Amara gave him the chance to get to know her as a real person, not just through his dad’s memories. 

“Dean,” she says, so loving, and he has to swallow hard. 

“Hi, mom,” he says.

When they hug, she doesn’t smell like pie. She smells like gun smoke and cheap shampoo, and he can’t hold back the tears any longer. 

She doesn’t say anything when he pulls back to rub a hand under his eyes, just smiles at him. “I hear you’re up to something reckless,” she says.

“When is he not?” Cas asks dryly from behind him.

Dean scoffs, throwing a grin over his shoulder. “Baby, on the scale of the most reckless things I’ve ever done, this isn’t even top 10.” 

He doesn’t even notice the slip of his tongue until Mary raises an eyebrow at him. Christ, he spent how many years fighting down anything and everything that could tip his hand about his feelings for Cas — so successfully that even Cas himself had no idea — and now one kiss later he’s just throwing pet names all over the place. 

“Uh,” he says, and stalls. He doesn’t have any kind of good explanation for this, and he knows his mom is a good person but she was born in the 50s, and—

She touches his hand. “I’m happy for you, Dean,” she says, firmly, leaving no room for argument. 

He’s already so full up on emotion that he didn’t think his heart could get any fuller today. Apparently, he was wrong. “Thanks, mom,” he says, is all he’s capable of saying. He looks down to hide the heat in his cheeks, to where her hand touches his. 

And — _that’s_ new.

She must follow his gaze, because she inhales sharply. “Dean, you’re hurt.” 

Cas, summoned by the very thought of Dean being injured, is immediately at his side. His eyes go wide and ashamed at the sight.

But Dean looks at the scarred white handprint, seared around his wrist where Cas grasped Dean and held on despite an impossible force pulling them apart, and something in his chest warms.

He flexes his wrist in fascination, watching the way the tendons move under the shape of Cas’s long fingers. It seems right, somehow, seeing where Cas’ thumb wrapped around the underside of his wrist, over the place where he’d written his name in ballpoint pen to keep Cas fixed in his memory.

“I’m okay,” Dean says, catching Cas’s gaze where he looks guilt-stricken at the idea of having hurt Dean. “Totally worth it.” 

“I can heal you,” Cas offers, and lifts a hand towards Dean’s, and Dean pulls his arm back before he realizes what he’s doing. 

Now both of Mary’s eyebrows are high. Cas’s are drawn together, forehead wrinkled in confusion. 

“This is the last scar I’m ever gonna get, right? Might as well keep it,” he fumbles, trying to cover for his reaction. “Besides, I earned it.” 

If he’s thinking about the smooth skin on his shoulder and the handprint that faded from his skin long before he could reckon with the depth of what it meant, neither of them needs to know that.

+

It’s easier than Dean might have expected to get a whole mess of hunters, at least 50% wearing flannel, to sit in a circle and hold hands. But if you’re in the life long enough, you’re bound to find yourself in a seance or two. 

Plus, he realizes with a jolt, more than half the room is women — he always thought of hunting as being mostly men, but there are a lot more women here than he ever figured. He’s not sure if he was just wrong in his estimates about the community or if hunting’s particularly hard on women, that so many of them are already here, and makes a mental note to talk to Ellen about it if they get through this.

Sam’s got one hand in Missouri’s and the other in Pamela’s. Missouri doesn’t open her eyes, but she turns directly to him as she says, “Dean Winchester, I better hear you start praying.” 

Jo sniggers.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles.

Well, he’s got plenty more practice at praying these days than he used to.

_Jack_ , he thinks. _I know you were planning to be hands-off and, listen, I get it. You were always wiser than me anyway, you knew what the world needed better than me ’n’ Sam ever did. Right now, though? This is big, whatever’s happening. If we don’t stop it, it’ll destroy everyone in Heaven — all the souls at peace, they don’t deserve that. And it’ll take Cas away again, and hurt him. So, uh, I’m hoping you can hear this, because I know you, kid, and I know you wouldn’t let something like this go down if you could stop it. And you’re the only one who can._

There’s a loud _crack_ , and for a split second Dean’s heart rises — somehow they made it through to Jack already, and this whole thing is going to work.

Yeah, because when in his life have things _ever_ gone off without a hitch, he thinks bitterly as the door slams open, sigil fading out as the warding fails, to reveal Naomi.

Dean jumps to his feet, Cas rising behind him, as the other hunters immediately go for weapons they probably don’t have on them and wouldn’t make a difference against her anyway.

“What is going on in here?” Naomi asks. Her face and tone are tight, controlled, and Dean can hear the fury lacing the edges. 

“Told you so,” murmurs the angel Iridiel from a step behind her. 

At his side, Cas sucks in a sharp breath. “Naomi,” he says, and if Dean thought Naomi sounded angry it’s got nothing on the way Cas sounds. His voice is more a growl than anything.

Operating on some deeply-rooted protective instinct that doesn’t listen to logic, Dean steps forward to put himself between Cas and the threat. He feels a prickle of annoyance when his shoulder knocks into Cas’s, whose half outstretched arm in front of Dean indicates he’s doing the same thing. 

“Castiel,” Naomi says. “Back from the dead again, I see. And conspiring with the Winchesters against your own people. Some things never change.”

“You and I have very different definitions of who ‘my own people’ are,” Cas tells her, and she tightens her lips, shaking her head. 

“I should have known you’d never do anything to help Heaven,” she says to Dean. “Even if it means your own downfall as well as all of ours.”

“Was that a threat?” Cas asks before Dean can respond. Even standing as they are, Dean can feel the tension in Cas’s body.

“An observation,” she says. “Your prison break is only making the situation more unstable. I understand you are touchy about your humans, Castiel, but I would hope you would be able to see reason about this.”

“You’ll forgive me if I am disinclined to trust your judgment when it comes to Dean Winchester,” Cas tells her, every word taut with controlled anger.

“Watch yourself, Castiel,” she says, stepping forward. “You forget that _I_ have never laid a hand on Dean.”

The quiet rustle of metal against fabric is the only warning Dean gets before Cas steps toward Naomi, silver blade in hand, blazing with fury. 

Yeah, it’s long past time he intervened in this angel drama, he thinks, grabbing Cas’s shoulder before he goes any further. Cas is impossibly stronger than him, laser focused on Naomi and incandescent with anger, but Dean’s hand stops him cold. With a flutter in his heartbeat, Dean sees the red handprint around his wrist and realizes it’s the same shoulder that he held onto before, dragging Cas out of the Empty with him. He wonders if Cas feels the echo, too. 

“I get it, okay, I don’t trust her either,” he says to Cas. “But for once, we’re all on the same team here.”

“Is that so,” Naomi says, eyes narrowed. “Because it looks like you took advantage of Heaven’s current weakness to save your _friend_ , and are now making some foolish attempt at freeing the rest of your friends from their peaceful rest.” 

“…okay, well, that’s true,” Dean admits. “But I’m not lying when I say we’re actually doing this to stop the Empty. Trust me, Cas and me want that thing handled just as much as you do.”

“And what precisely is your plan to ‘handle it’?”

“Me.”

It’s the second time in what must be just a matter of hours — though it feels so much longer —that Dean’s been stopped in his tracks by Jack’s voice. 

But this time, when he turns to see him standing beside Sam, looking calm and radiant, there’s no doubt in his heart that what he’s looking at is the real Jack. Something in his gut just _knows_ — call it a paternal instinct — and he wonders how he could ever have mistaken the creature in the Empty for his son. 

“ _Jack_ ,” Cas breathes beside him, and all the cold fury he had directed at Naomi is gone from his voice. 

Jack raises a hand in greeting. “Hello, Castiel,” he says, warm.

Cas darts a glance back at Naomi, as though he’s afraid to cross over towards Jack and leave Dean unprotected. Or maybe Dean’s projecting, his own desire to go embrace his son warring with his awareness that they aren’t out of the woods yet and that Naomi’s an active threat towards Cas. 

Dean catches Cas’s eye, and by unspoken mutual agreement they step away from Naomi. (He keeps her in his line of sight, though. No telling what she’ll do now that he’s brought a nephilim into Heaven, and he hopes faintly that she doesn’t know about the way Jack stole the power from her God.)

Dean’s pretty sure he’s had more hugs in the last few hours than in a whole decade of his life. But wrapping his arms around his kid — he doesn’t think this could ever get old.

Sam’s eyes are wide with wonder as he stares at Jack, and Dean remembers he’s lived decades since he last saw him.

“Jack,” Sam’s voice is wondering. “I’m so glad you’re okay. When I never saw you again, I wasn’t sure. I, you know, I hoped for the best. I hoped you were happy.” 

“I am,” Jack reassures him, earnest. “I’ve been exploring the stars. There’s so much of creation to see, it’s so beautiful out there.” 

“What, no cell service out there?” asks Dean, and regrets it when it comes out bitter. He knows why Jack left things the way he did. It’s not his fault that Dean’s seen too many backs turn on him to be able to handle it well. 

Jack looks down, sheepish. “I didn’t know how to handle all the prayers, at first, and there was so much to hear."

He looks up at Dean, and his face is open, almost pleading. “When you died, Dean, it was very hard to keep my word. I had to shut out the prayers, after that, otherwise I would have intervened and — I know how important free will is. You taught me that.” 

From the side, Naomi clears her throat. Which — Dean’s glad for it, for once, because he’s not anywhere near ready to think about his death again just yet. 

“Jack,” she says, customer service voice back in full effect. “We’re hoping you’ll make an exception to your non-intervention policy, admirable as it is.”

Yeah, Dean hears the use of “we,” and snorts. Guess she finally decided they were all on the same team after all, now that Team Free Will’s got their heavy hitter.

“Yes, Sam told me what was happening,” Jack says. And looks embarrassed. “I think it’s my fault, the way the Empty is collapsing.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cas says, reflexive. “You were used.” 

“You can’t blame yourself for that,” Dean agrees. 

Jack gives them a grateful smile. 

“Anyway. The Empty predates me. I can’t fix this.”

It’s like popping a balloon, the way that Dean’s heart deflates. This was their _one_ play, and now it’s going to come back for him and for Cas, and they can’t do anything to stop it—

Jack cocks his head, like he’s listening. Then he says: “But we can.”

“We?” Dean repeats, desperate.

“We,” Amara says, from where she’s just — there, suddenly, with no warning or noise or anything to announce her presence. “Hello, Dean. It’s been a while.”

Naomi takes a sharp step backward, and there are several gasps from the assembled hunters at the new arrival. 

Dean abruptly remembers that the last time he saw Amara, he was in the process of trying to betray her, and he swallows hard. 

She smiles, like she knows what he’s thinking, and turns deliberately away from him. 

“Would someone mind showing us to the site of the breach?” she asks. “I hear we have some cleaning up to do.” 

+

The final battle against the Empty is both magnificent and also anti-climactic. 

After all the near-misses they’ve had, Dean thinks they’re overdue for something like this: the combined powers of light and darkness, filling the white hallways of Heaven, creation and destruction working in tandem to reach into the Empty and rebuild it as a space of nothingness. 

Jack raises his hand one last time, a final surge of light traces the cracks where the inky black tendrils had reached, and then it’s over.

Jack brushes his hands together in satisfaction. “There,” he chirps, beaming. 

“That’s it?” Sam asks.

“Yes,” Jack nods. “It’s all back in place now.”

Naomi presses a hand against the wall, as though feeling for its structural integrity. After a moment, her face softens in a way Dean hasn’t seen before, and she nods slowly. “I’ll have to conduct a full test, but it seems Heaven is back in order.”

“Did you doubt us?” Amara asks, raising an eyebrow, and Naomi’s face shows a moment of genuine fear. Right, Dean remembers, the angels did try to wipe out Amara a couple times. He’s not the only one in this room she’d have a grudge against. Actually, she’s got a pretty well deserved vendetta against everyone here. 

“And the beings that the Empty contains?” Cas cuts in. “The angels and demons?”

“They’re at peace,” Jack assures him. “Resting.”

“Even the shadow that rules there,” Amara adds. “An old friend. They can go back to sleep now as well.”

Dean looks over at Cas. Cas is already looking at him, and—

Slowly, Dean smiles.

It’s over. It’s really over. 

They’re free.

+

“So we’ll be going now,” Amara says, and it brings Dean straight back to reality.

“Wait, Jack,” Cas says, urgent. “Are you sure you can’t stay? Just for a while? I know—”

“I’m _kidding_ ,” Amara says. Jack gives her a fond look. “You can’t joke with them like that,” he tells her. “It’s mean.” 

It’s deeply weird to see the two of them together, thick as thieves. Dean knew Jack had Amara’s power but he hadn’t thought of it this way, of her being, well, _herself._ Now, he realizes, Amara is probably the only being in creation who Jack can relate to. She is Jack’s, what, great aunt or something? The dawn-of-time family tree gives him a headache.

“I’d like to stay for a little bit, if that’s okay,” Jack says. “The Universe is beautiful but I think I got a little lost in myself out there. I didn’t realize— well, I miss you all. I still want to be hands-off, but. I miss movie nights. Is that alright?”

Dean has to clench his jaw against the swell of love in his throat. Goddamn, he made so many mistakes with Jack and he’s still one of the best things Dean’s ever had a hand in. 

“Of course,” Cas says, and Sam chimes in, “We would love that.”

Jack looks at Dean.

“Yes,” Dean says, fast, berating himself for letting there be any doubt. “Jack, of course we want you here. _I_ want you here.” 

“Go be with your family, kid,” Amara tells him, gentle. “You aren’t the only omniscient cosmic being on call to handle crises.” 

Jack smiles at her, and then at Dean, and Cas puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and if Dean’s vision goes a little blurry from unshed tears — he’s got Cas back and his mom back and his kid back so yeah, he’s emotional, sue him.

It’s all a blur after that anyway, a never ending stream of hugs and introductions and more hugs. It’s like twenty minutes, tops, before one of the hunters somehow convinces the other angel to summon several bottles of Macallan 25, apparently a great way to kill time before they all figure out what the hell to do about Heaven now.

Dean stays back from the fray, too wrung out to handle any more conversations with formerly-dead loved ones at the moment. He leans against a wall and watches with a smile as Sam introduces Jack to their Bobby; behind them, he’s pretty sure Charlie is hitting on Jo. 

Someone steps beside him, and he doesn’t have to look.

“Kind of hard to wrap your mind around, isn’t it,” he says, trusting Cas will know what he means.

“We’ve had some wins before,” Cas says, thoughtful. “But never like this.”

“I feel like we all just watched the Death Star explode,” Dean says.

“You _do_ remind me of an Ewok,” Cas says dryly, and Dean chokes. 

“You’re really gonna make me regret forcing you to watch Star Wars with me, aren’t you.”

Cas laughs under his breath, and they’re silent together, watching Mary catch Jack up in a tight hug.

“It’s kind of funny to think that with all the chaos we had going on down here, the kid was off stargazing,” Dean says.

Cas shifts where he’s leaning against the wall, pressing up on his shoulder til he’s facing Dean.

“Dean, remember, he’s just a child, despite all his power,” he tells him, voice serious. "He just had to grow up fast to protect himself. You of all people should understand that.”

Dean’s hand flexes. “Jesus, man, you really know how to go for the jugular, don’t you,” he says, voice tight.

Cas makes a noncommittal sound in response, not willing to back off his defense of Jack.

“And no, I get it. It’s just,” he grimaces. “Cas, I thought he would have brought you back. We got back to the bunker, and you weren’t there, and I kept telling myself well, maybe it’ll take some time. Every night I prayed to you, and I prayed to Jack, and I told myself _maybe tomorrow._ And you never came back and then — well, I only had so many tomorrows, y’know?

“Dean,” Cas says, and gives him a long, sorrowful look. 

“Anyway.” Dean says, looking away from Cas’s mournful blue eyes. “I’m not blaming him. But having a god in the family takes some getting used to.” 

Cas looks over at the crowd. Jack, in conversation with Mary, cocks his head and turns to them, abruptly leaving the conversation and heading over to where they stand at the periphery.

“My… ears were burning,” he says when he arrives, pronouncing the idiom with care and then immediately looking to Dean for approval.

Dean smiles, claps him on the shoulder. “You got it right,” he says, and Jack beams with pride.

He looks from Dean, to Cas, back to Dean, and smiles even wider. “Oh! I’m very happy for you both.” 

Now it’s Dean whose ears are burning as he feels his face heat. “It’s that obvious, huh?” he sighs, resigned to being painfully obvious and not particularly upset about it.

“Well, I am omniscient,” Jack says. “But also, yes. I always knew you loved each other, and it was confusing to me why that seemed to be a secret. Sam tried to explain it to me but I didn’t understand. I’m glad you’ve cleared it up now.”

Dean chokes on air. Cas’s trenchcoat rustles at his side as he shifts awkwardly beside him.

Cool, right, so there really was never any chance of dignity. He’s going to have a very annoyed conversation with Sam in the future, right as soon as he gets through this coughing fit.

“Anyway!” Jack continues brightly. “What were you talking about?”

“Star Wars,” Dean recovers enough to say.

“You,” Cas says at the same time.

Dean rolls his eyes at Cas.

Cas slants him a look, but his eyes have turned more serious.

“There is one thing I wanted to ask you,” Cas says, and something in his tone makes Dean go still. “Jack, I know you are not trying to intervene, and I respect that. But after everything he sacrificed for our world, Dean deserved to live a long, full life.” 

Dean clenches his jaw. Oh, so it’s _this_ conversation again. 

“I _am_ sorry, Dean,” Jack says, eyes wide and sorrowful. 

“You have the power,” Cas says, quiet and confident. “You could return him to life. Give him the life he deserved.” 

The thought hits Dean like a baseball bat and he’s dizzy on the images that flood his mind. If he _hadn’t_ died, stupid and careless and exhausted. Watching Sam get married, meeting his kid and watching them grow up. Retire from hunting, for good — pick up EMT work or, hell, a volunteer firefighter gig just to keep some kind of excitement in his life. Find out what a Winchester looks like with gray hair. 

“No.”

It takes Dean a moment to realize he was the one who spoke.

“Dean,” Cas says, so soft.

“Cas, I can’t.” 

“It’s what you deserve.” Cas looks heartbroken, and Dean can’t look at him. He has to head this off before it goes any further. Can’t let Jack even confirm if he’d be willing, because he thinks as soon as that happens he might lose his resolve entirely. Tightening his jaw, he turns to Jack instead.

“If you brought me back to life, right when I died. And even if you brought Cas back at the same time, so I—” he cuts himself off before his words can betray him. “What happens to Sam?”

“Time would branch,” Jack says. “So in that timeline, Sam would re-set to the moment of your death.”

“So for all we know, he could die the next day,” Dean says grimly, looking over at where Sam is talking quietly with Mary and Ellen. He doesn’t seem to be aware of how the hunters turn to him, automatic, recognizing natural leadership in the set of his shoulders. “There’s no guarantee he gets to grow old, the way he did. And his kid?”

“Would not exist in that timeline,” Jack confirms. 

Dean nods, sighs. He shakes his head. “I can’t do that to him.” 

“Dean—” Cas starts, and Dean puts up a hand.

“Cas, I know, man. But listen. I’ve made my peace with it, with how things ended. It’s the way I always knew I’d go out.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Cas argues.

“I can’t think like that,” Dean has to grit his teeth. “Cas, I just — I can’t.”

“So you would give up your life for Sam’s?” Cas says, then sighs. Dean doesn’t even have to say anything — he sees the words hit Cas just as he says them. “Of course you would.”

Dean smiles, and it’s not even entirely forced. “Not the first time. But I think it might be the last.” 

He doesn’t say: this is the first time since he was four years old that he’s had almost all the people he loves here, generally out of danger and with a real shot at peace, and he can’t stop thinking about what it could be like to live without a shadow of terror hanging over his head. 

Thinking maybe, given enough time, he might be able to release the fear that’s wrapped around his throat his entire life, always waiting for the next loss. 

Nothing’s guaranteed, even in Heaven, but for once he doesn’t have to constantly worry about losing Sam, or Cas, or anyone else. The thought of living a long life on earth — it’s painful, what he missed out on. But there’s something about getting to let go of that part of his mind that’s 24/7 fixated on losing the people he loves. He wonders what it might be like, living without that worry. 

He thinks it might feel a little like freedom.

+

Afterwards.

Dean’s sitting on the hood of the Impala. It’s just as beautiful a day as it’s ever been, sun high in the sky and heating the black metal to just this-side-of-uncomfortable where it presses through his jeans.

And there’s no compulsion. No need to go anywhere, no need to keep driving. No need to feel a kind of fake happiness forced in on him. He can just be still.

He knows the surroundings are a mirage, but then again it doesn’t really seem to matter. Once you see too much behind the scenes, thinking too closely about what counts as reality when everything is somehow fabricated and alterable — he’s not sure if it’s philosophy or theoretical physics, but whatever it is, it’s a shortcut to a pounding headache. 

He’s as sure as he’s ever been that his memories, his choices, the contents of his head — that’s all his. And when push comes to shove, that’s the only thing that really matters. He spent a decade of his life fighting for that, after all, so he’s going to enjoy it.

So yeah, he’s happy, but it’s not because some asshole angel decided they knew best about what his happiness would look like. It’s because he won, and his brother is off somewhere greeting his wife, and he knows what Cas’s smile feels like against his lips, and at some point in the not-too-distant future he’s going to find himself on a beach with Sam and Cas and Jack and Eileen and probably plenty of other party crashers. 

He’s a simple man, and getting all that at once — well, it’s more reasons to be happy than he can remember having in a long time. 

The rustle of wings behind him is still familiar after all these years, and his heart thumps unevenly. He feels greedy, getting so much, but he thinks maybe there’s one more piece to his happiness after all.

Cas examines him for a long moment, eyes warm as he takes in the full scene. “Dean Winchester,” he finally says, and there’s a smile in his voice.

“Castiel,” Dean says back, drawling out the extra syllables he never uses to approximate a full name. “You were gone a while.”

Cas comes to perch on the hood beside him, and sighs. “There are a lot of questions to be answered about how to restructure Heaven. Giving free rein to a couple dozen hunters doesn’t answer the problem about what to do with the other billion souls. The angels are looking for guidance, for leadership.”

Dean’s voice is very carefully even as he asks, “And you want to be the one who leads them?”

Cas lifts one shoulder. “They’ve asked me to. Jack, of course, is the most powerful but I think finally the angels are seeing the value of lived experience on Earth.” He throws a sly glance at Dean. “I think the work you did to prevent Heaven’s collapse may have had something to do with the mass change of heart.” 

And yeah, it’s great that the angels are starting to remove the sticks from their asses, but that’s not what Dean’s focusing on.

“So you’re leaving,” he says tightly. 

Cas cocks his head. “I’m not leaving Heaven.”

“But you’re leaving me.” The words slip out before he can stop them and Dean immediately wants to shoot himself in the face. He sounds like a goddamn child, and there’s nothing he can do to save face now, just grit his jaw against the embarrassment of how needy he sounds. 

Cas gives him a long, even look. “Dean, you haven’t asked me to stay.”

It’s a standoff, he thinks, showdown at the OK Corral as they look at each other.

Here are the lessons Dean has learned about _asking for what he wants:_

  1. It gets you nothing. _Four years old staring up at motel ceilings asking-hoping-bargaining-not-praying to anyone who might listen to please just bring his mom back, he’ll be so good he’ll eat his vegetables he won’t ever complain about Sammy crying just please bring her back._ (Here’s what that gets you: she doesn’t come back, and it’s six months later and Sammy has been screaming for three hours and Dad is half a bottle of whiskey deep and you say _come on Sammy, just shut up_ and then you have to go take gasping sobbing breaths in the bathroom because you broke your word and now she’ll never come back.)  
  

  2. It gets you rejection. _Thirteen and so careful, so diplomatic, asking if they could stay just another month in Odessa, Dad, sir, I know the guy in Montgomery says there’ve been reports of demon omens in Alabama but Sammy’s just made some friends at school and could we possibly finish out the year we can stay alone could we?_ (Here’s what that gets you: _Did I ask your opinion I’m keeping this family together Dean don’t ever question my decisions now pack your bag, we’re leaving tomorrow at oh-six-hundred._ )  
  

  3. It gets you worse off than you were. _Thirty nine and not asking, no he’s learned his lesson, but thinking-wondering-imagining a future, not a bloody end but retirement; driving somewhere with Sam and Cas where the destination isn’t monsters and gravedirt and death but sun and beer and beach; watching the gray come in his hair and Sam’s hair and if he’s very lucky Cas’s too._ (Here’s what that gets you: sharp pain and blood down your lower back and black spots growing in your vision and _well, it’s what I always expected, anyway_.)



But.

Here is the other lesson Dean has learned: 

  1. He can’t do this, any of this, without Cas. 



He learned that one over and over and over again: an empty trenchcoat folded like a flag, Cas’s hand slipping out of his, ashes shaped like wings in the dirt; a body burning, a back turned, a closed door, an empty room. 

Forty years of instinct, of pride, of keeping his chin up and his guard up and never asking for what the universe won’t give you, versus losing Cas? Losing Cas, especially now, especially knowing what his face looks like framed by Dean’s hands and lit up with love?

He was never going to win this. 

But he thinks losing, surrendering, might be the sweetest thing of all.

“Stay,” he says. 

The word is a tangible thing where it hangs in the air between them. “Stay with me, Cas, I — I need you.”

He hadn’t recognized the hesitation, the fear in the lines around Cas’s eyes until they melt away. Until Cas smiles bright as the sun and Dean’s heart flips over in his chest. 

“Of course, Dean. Of course I’ll stay. You only had to ask.”

And then — Dean realizes, this is something he can do now, something he’s played out in his head a hundred times, a thousand times, but never had the nerve to do. He _can_ grab Cas by his stupid tie and pull him in for a kiss. 

Cas kisses him back without hesitation, like it’s something they’ve always done. It feels like that, a little bit, the way they slot together so naturally. 

But it’s also so new, so incredible cataloguing the way Cas reacts under his lips and hands: the way Dean tugs gently on his lower lip with his teeth, and Cas’s breath hitches, and then Cas — always a fast learner — bites at Dean’s lip, and Dean’s hand clenches at Cas’s lower back as he gasps. Dean’s always been a physical person and this is natural for him, the way he presses into Cas, using his hands to say all the tender, vulnerable things he can’t shape into words. 

Cas figures out almost impossibly quickly how to turn Dean inside out. It’s like he took his angel general commander brain, trained on thousands of years of battle strategy, and focused it entirely on the task of turning Dean on as quickly and completely as possible.

He tightens a hand in Dean’s hair and mouths at the corner of Dean’s jaw, and Dean is two seconds away from lying flat on the hood of the Impala and letting this go to its inevitable conclusion right here. 

“Cas—“ he gasps, summoning all his strength to pull away. “Cas, we— should we go somewhere more private?”

Cas pulls back. Dean looks at the dark look in his eyes and thinks _fuck it, we might as well do this here because I’m not stopping for a second to move_.

But Cas says, “If you’d prefer,” like he’s totally indifferent, and suddenly they’re in a bed. 

“Angel magic,” Dean says dizzily. “Handy.”

“Enough talking,” Cas tells him, and kisses him down into the bed. 

It’s almost unfair how good this is, Cas pressed up against him like their bodies were made fit together, one hand in his hair and the other pushed up under his shirt to wrap around his ribs — the ribs that still bear the protective Enochian Cas carved into them. Their history is written into his body, on his ribs and his shoulder and his wrist and now in the bruises Cas is sucking into his neck.

Dean is drunk on this, on the way Cas moves against him when Dean runs one hand up and down the length of his spine, on the way Cas — who doesn’t need to breathe — gasps in air between kisses. His brain, awed, keeps reminding him that it’s _Cas_ he’s doing this with, like he can’t process it. 

That’s _Cas_ who’s kissing him desperately, like he’s searching for revelation. It’s _Cas’s_ hands on him, _Cas_ making noises in his ear as they press together.

He gets a hand into the hair at the base of Cas’s neck, wraps the other around his jaw, and tugs at Cas a little so he can look him in the eye. He’s gotta just — he doesn’t know, take a moment. 

The room, wherever they are, is dark, but he can see Cas just fine. Their breath comes heavy, chests pressing together. “Cas,” Dean whispers, awed. He rubs one thumb across Cas’s cheekbone, holding something impossibly precious in his hands. 

“Dean,” Cas rumbles. His hair is wrecked, eyes wide and hungry, and Dean shudders at the thought that, of all the terrible choices and betrayals and lies that made up his life, somehow he got enough right to wind up here, making Cas look like that.

Cas leans down, slowly, and presses a kiss to his forehead. Dean closes his eyes, and feels Cas’s lips gentle against his eyelids, the tip of his nose. 

Against his ear, Cas says something softly in Enochian. 

Dean doesn’t have to speak the language to understand. And he might not be able to respond easily in words, in English or any other language, but he can show Cas his response in this language they’re building between them, lips and hands and gasps.

He pushes Cas’s coat and jacket off his shoulders, embarrassed at his own thought of how naked Cas looks to him in just his shirt. He feels like a Victorian maiden, swooning at the sight of Cas’s wrists. 

Hell, it’s a good thing that with Cas he doesn’t have to pretend to be more suave than he is, because that ship has definitely sailed.

It’s only when they’re naked together that Dean’s vulnerability kicks back into gear.

“Cas, you. I don’t.” He tries again. “I haven’t done this much, with guys.” 

Cas smiles at him. “Dean, I assure you I have even less practical experience than you do.” He runs a hand along Dean’s side, watches him shiver. “But I know every cell of your body. I think we can figure it out.” 

The reminder of where this all started, of how interconnected they are to each other, has Dean surging against Cas, pressing him down into the bed with every line of his body. 

It’s so much skin, so much touch and warmth and heat, and Dean’s brain goes completely offline. 

No more overthinking. Just Cas, and trust, and the way they move together, and lightning tracing up his spine as he watches Cas come apart under him. 

He’s heard Cas say his name a thousand times, somber, warm, pleading, but nothing compares the sound of _Dean!_ hitched into a gasp as Cas arches up, falls apart at his touch. 

Dean’s not far behind, with how quickly Cas has learned his body — or maybe he’s not learning it at all, maybe he’s had the knowledge of every sensitive place on Dean’s skin tucked into his angel head since he first rebuilt him, waiting a decade to put it to practical use. Dean’s not sure, and it doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters is Cas’s body against his, one hand pulling a gasp out of Dean on every breath, while the other hand wraps around his wrist — handprint lining up with the one already scarred into his skin — and that’s _it_ for Dean, vision going white as a wave of pleasure races along his nerves, so strong that it comes out as a desperate moan. 

His breath is shaky when he gathers Cas up in his arms, as they come back to themselves together. Cas’s mouth moves against his shoulder, and Dean feels rather than hears the _I love you_ pressed into his skin like a prayer. 

+

“It _is_ true that the angels will need help restructuring Heaven,” Cas says later, head pillowed on Dean’s chest.

Dean’s heart hammers. _He said he would stay but—_

“Dean. I’m not leaving you.”

“Mind-reading is cheating, Cas,” he says, but he can breathe a little easier.

He feels Cas’s smile against his skin. “Didn’t have to. I can hear your heartbeat.”

Dean will never admit to blushing like a teenage girl at that. He clears his throat. “Anyway. You were saying.”

“I don’t know that I trust Naomi and Amara to do the best job determining what an ideal afterlife for humans looks like. Jack, I trust more, but he’s still so young.”

And Dean can’t dispute that, but — “Sure sounds like you’re thinking about leaving,” he says, and he’s almost 100% calm about it.

Cas raises his head, props his chin up on a forearm to look him straight in the eyes. “Dean. I am not thinking about leaving. And even if we are physically apart, we’re still connected.”

“Right, a ‘profound bond.’ Very Hallmark, Cas.”

Cas has tilted his head and squinted at Dean like this probably a hundred times, but watching him do it naked from where he’s pressed up along Dean’s body is a new experience, and Dean’s vision goes a little fuzzy. 

“No, I mean that literally. You told me that my name came through Heaven’s message for you when you arrived, even though they didn’t plant it there. Didn’t you wonder why?”

Dean raises a hand to absentmindedly stroke through Cas’s hair even as he racks his brain. “I thought — wasn’t that just because the Empty was crawling into Heaven?”

Cas’s eyes are deep and impossibly warm. “That was just the vector for it. The reason you heard my name is because you heard my prayer.”

Dean’s hand freezes. “I— what?”

“When I was pulled into the Empty, I— at first, I thought I could be content, knowing I had saved you. But, selfishly, I wanted to be alive again to see you, protect you. So I prayed.”

“To me? Cas, I’m human.”

Cas rolls his eyes, flicks Dean’s side. “Yes, Dean, I’m aware. But there are two things on earth I have faith in — you and Jack. And I knew Jack wouldn’t hear me, though I prayed to him anyway. I didn’t think you would either, but then again,” he smiles at Dean, “That’s what faith is.”

“Cas,” Dean says. There are no other words he can say.

“I stopped praying, after a time,” Cas says, quieter now like he’s ashamed. “It was a long time, there, and it was so loud.”

Dean has to be misunderstanding this. “So you’re saying that when I heard Bobby say your name, I was hearing some kind of prayer from you?”

“I’m sure of it. Dean, you can’t feel it, but—there’s a part of my grace that’s been reaching out to you for years. I don’t know when it happened, but it’s tethered to your soul now. That’s what I mean, when I say we’re connected.”

Dean doesn’t speak, just wraps his other arm tighter around Cas’s back like he can convey everything he’s feeling through his skin, because he sure as hell doesn’t have the words for it.

“It shouldn’t be possible, of course,” Cas continues, “But you’ve spent more time in the presence of angels than almost any human in history. Certainly no one since Jesus Christ. And you’ve prayed specifically to me more than, I believe, any human has prayed to one specific angel. Somehow, with everything between us, enough of my grace has wrapped around your soul to make a connection possible. I, uh. I hope you don’t mind.” 

He sounds embarrassed, and his grace is connected to Dean’s _soul_ , and what else could Dean possibly do besides use the hand already wrapped in Cas’s hair to tug him up and kiss him?

+

Some time later, Dean’s catching his breath when he remembers. “Okay, so you’re not leaving, but you think they need help rebuilding Heaven.”

“Do you disagree?” Cas asks, low voice even raspier than usual, and Dean sighs.

“No, you’re right, those two are about the last people I’d trust to figure out what Paradise should look like.”

“My thinking exactly,” Cas says, and smiles. “That’s why I think we should both be involved.”

“We?”

Cas’s eyes are dark, unreadable. “I know it’s a lot to ask, for you to take on another responsibility. If anyone deserves to sit under their own vine and fig tree, it’s you. But—”

“Cas, no, I mean—that’s a hell of a big task. Figuring out what Heaven should look like for everyone — I don’t know that I’m the right guy for something like that.” There’s half a bad joke forming in his head, _a priest and a rabbi and a philosopher and, for some reason, a high school dropout, walk into a bar_. He stretches, rubs the back of his neck, fingers pressing accidentally into a bite mark that is definitely going to bruise. 

“You’re exactly the right guy. You have a deeper understanding of humanity than any of them. We could bring in Sam and Charlie, too. And Jack will be involved, of course, he’s the one who actually has to execute.”

“Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, Mother Theresa or someone instead? Or, y’know, someone who knows something about other religions beyond just the bloody parts?”

Cas hums thoughtfully. “That’s why you should be in the room. I can’t imagine Naomi considering these things. Maybe we’ll need more voices than I realized.”

“So we’re turning Heaven into a democracy.”

“More of an oligarchy, really—” Dean swats at Cas’s hip to shut him up, and Cas grins, unrepentant. “So are you in?” he asks. 

Dean knows without a shadow of a doubt that there are a thousand people better suited for this than him. People who actually spend time thinking about morality, and other religions, and philosophy, and whatever else. But it turns out that, once again, he’s just the guy in the position to give it his best shot. He figures if he says yes, he can basically help them figure out a dozen people to bring into the room so he doesn’t actually have to make the decisions — except maybe a veto on the bullshit on what Heaven _shouldn’t_ be like.

Plus — he doesn’t know how to say no to Cas anyway, and doesn’t really plan to figure it out any time soon. 

“Course I am,” Dean tells him.

Absentminded, he traces a line down Cas’s back, smiling at the way Cas ducks his head and arches into the touch, goosebumps rising under his fingertips. “Man. Figuring out what Heaven should look like with my angel boyfriend and our son, the new God. If I thought my life was weird, my afterlife really is even weirder.”

_But I wouldn’t change a single thing about it,_ he thinks _._

And he knows Cas hears him by the way he presses a kiss to Dean’s shoulder, lips curving in a smile against Dean’s skin.

Deep in Dean’s chest, there’s a gentle _tug_ , warm, subtle but undeniable. And maybe it has to do with having Cas all over him already, but just for an instant he gets this distinct sense of Cas in the back of his brain, wings and blue eyes and the smell of soil. 

“Was that…” he starts, stops. How does he ask this without sounding insane, he wonders. Dean remembers, in the Empty, feeling that same tug. He thought it was his instincts, trusting his gut.

“Told you so,” Cas says against his shoulder, drowsy.

“Cas. You’re telling me that was— I mean, I just heard. You know.” He can’t get the words out. It’s too impossible. 

“Yes, Dean,” Cas says, and yawns. “I prayed to you and you felt it.”

Dean stares at him with wide eyes, and Cas gives him a sleepy smile. “Now you know how I feel,” he says. “You’re a singular creature, Dean Winchester.” 

“Takes one to know one,” Dean says, awed by Cas and this impossible thing they’ve made together. It took a long time to weave together from blood and betrayal and lies and trust, from Hell to Earth, across Purgatory and the Empty and Heaven, family and friendship and love. For all the times he thought he lost Cas, the times Cas must have thought he lost him — they found each other, and then they found each other again, and again, and again. 

Dean’s got eternity now and he thinks that might, just might, be enough time to wrap his head around it all. 

For now, he presses another kiss to Cas’s hair, and sleeps.

* * *

Epilogue. 

Mary and John live down the road. 

They don’t live together, but they’re near enough that they can spend time together, see about maybe starting a second chapter together. They’ve both got plenty of baggage; lived through things the other could barely imagine. They’re not the same people that came into Sam’s nursery that night—hell, their marriage was hardly perfect even then—but there’s enough deep love between them that they’re going to see about getting to know each other all over again.

When Dean heard they weren’t going to be living together, he took a deep breath to steel against the inevitable clench in his gut, sour taste in his throat — only to realize a minute later that it never came. He knows there’s a version of himself from years ago that would be horrified, the idea of his parents not _together_ together, but that was a Dean that never got to know Mary as an adult, a Dean not yet out from under the long shadow of John Winchester, unable to do anything but idolize and defend him. 

Now, well. Things are more complicated.

Like this: 

It’s not long after the new foundations for Heaven have been laid out. (Dean’s had enough of theological slash philosophical slash whatever conversations to last a lifetime, but he thinks they’ve set things up in a way that works — finally struck a balance between _peace_ and _freedom — a_ nd now he gets to just have this: Cas, on a rocking chair beside his, profile lit up golden in the sunset.) 

Dean says to him: “We should have my Mom and Dad round for dinner. We could invite Sam and Eileen too—Jack, obviously—” and he’s already thinking about what would be the best place in the yard to bring the table out, where he could set up his grill close enough to be able to chat, when he realizes that Cas is silent.

He looks over. Cas’s eyes are unreadable, but there’s tension in the set of his mouth.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Cas says.

Dean runs back through what he’d said, but can’t find anything objectionable. “Is this about how they’re not living together? Because Mom told me they’re still seeing each other a lot, so I’m not worried it’ll be awkward.”

“No, it’s not your mother and father I’m concerned about. It’s your father and me.” 

Dean raises an eyebrow. “You wanna elaborate?”

Cas shifts in his chair to face him more directly. “Dean, I’ve never met your father. But I know you. I’ve held your soul in my hands and felt its scars. How could I sit down peaceably across a table and share a meal with the man who’s responsible for so many of them?”

Of everything, somehow, that’s the last thing Dean expected. 

He opens his mouth to defend his father, say he did the best he could, that Cas doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but — hell, it’s hard to argue with someone who’s not being metaphorical when they say they’ve seen your soul. It took Dean a long time to even recognize how heavy the load his father left on his shoulders was, and a longer time still to let it go. 

He says instead, “You don’t have to protect me.”

If anything, Cas’s face gets darker. “If I could have protected you from him, I would have.”

“Cas, come on—”

“You think I don’t know what your childhood was like? The abandonment, the drunken rages, the times he hit you? Dean, I don’t know every detail but I know enough that I think you’d have to hold me back.”

It grates along his bones to let a criticism of John Winchester go unchallenged, and he has to clench his jaw to stop himself from telling Cas to shut up. Even though he’s right. Especially because he’s right. 

“That’s not—”

“I know he held a _gun_ on you once, Dean—”

“Cas, enough.” Dean’s voice is sharper than he wants it to be, and the silence that falls is a physical thing between them. He scrapes a hand over his face, rubs at the stubble on his jaw as he tries to get his thoughts in order. Tries not to let his anger jump out. It’s a little easier here, Heaven helping smooth out some of the most jagged edges of his emotion, but there’s still plenty of bitterness to work through. He has to work not to take it out on Cas, the one person who’s always been on his side; the safest person to take his anger out on and the least deserving of it. 

“Listen,” he says, making a conscious effort to keep his voice low and steady. “You’re not wrong, okay? There’s a lot of bad water under the bridge. But he’s still— he’s still my Dad, you know? Most of what I am comes from him. The good and the bad.”

“You are your own man, Dean Winchester,” Cas tells him, eyes blazing. “Who you are — the person you had to become despite him, _because_ of him — he doesn’t get to take credit for that. I will tell you that you’re a good man every day from now til eternity in hopes that one day you believe it.”

Dean has to look away from Cas and the intensity of his gaze, taking a long drink of beer and swallowing it hard past the lump in his throat. “I— I’m getting there, okay? Cas, you know how much— how you’ve changed the way I see myself, right?” 

His face is hot and he can’t risk a glance up at Cas for fear that he might actually lose his grip on the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He stands, instead, steps to the railing and looks out at the horizon. “And I’m not, I’m not in denial about my Dad anymore, like I used to be. I used to hero worship him, never let someone say a bad word about him. Never even let myself even think anything bad about him. But it’s been a long time, and I’m not gonna lie to myself. I used to think he did the best he could, and maybe he did, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t screw up.” 

Dean knocks his fist against the railing, pensive. “The thing is, Cas, I’m not angry about it so much anymore. Not because it wasn’t bad — you know it was bad — but if I let myself be angry about all the shit that’s happened to me I’d never stop being angry, so. I had to just — just move past it.” 

The floorboards creak, and Cas’s hand falls warm and familiar on his shoulder.

“You’re a better man than me,” Cas says, quiet. “It’ll be a long time before I can stop being angry at your father.” 

“Always the guardian angel,” Dean says, teasing, leaning back into Cas to take the sting out of his words. “Have you always felt like this, about him? You never said.”

Cas hums, considering. “When I first came to know you—when I was wrapping your body together around your soul—I didn’t have the language, the tools to understand my reactions to what I saw in your past. I was… you could say, protective, from the beginning. But it was much later that I had the reference points to really understand. And then I was furious at him. Especially when I saw how you started falling into your father’s patterns with Jack."

Cas’s voice is even, carrying no judgment, but shame burns hot in Dean anyway. It doesn’t matter how much he’s apologized to Jack, how he knows Jack has forgiven him a hundred times over for the way he treated him when he was at his lowest, desperate and furious and terrified that nothing he’d ever done in life was in his own control. 

“Dean.” Cas shifts at his side, moving his hand from Dean’s shoulder to his chin and gently tilting his face so he can’t avoid eye contact. When he meets Cas’s gaze, ashamed, he sees nothing but openness, forgiveness, and love he’s still trying to tell himself he deserves.

“Listen to me. The point is — you’ve made mistakes, yes, and you atone for them. You try to be better than you were, to break the patterns. As long as your father was alive, he never did that. So yes, I’m angry at him still, but if you can move past your anger and try to have a relationship with him, here. Well. I will try my hardest not to accidentally stab him during dinner.” 

“I’ll keep the steak knives in the drawer, just to be safe,” Dean says weakly, threading his arms around Cas’s waist and pulling him close.

“You know I could cause catastrophic damage with a butter knife,” Cas murmurs against his neck, and Dean huffs a laugh that’s dangerously close to a sob, tightens his grip.

Cas cradles his hand against the back of Dean’s head, strokes his fingers through the hair that’s starting to get longer than he ever wore it on earth. They’re quiet together for a long moment, only the sound of cicadas and the distant rustling of horses in their stalls to break the silent twilight. 

“I have to say,” Cas says, quiet, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to say this. “I’m surprised you would want me to meet your father. Knowing how he made you feel about liking men. Or, well—”

“Male-shaped genderless celestial whatevers?” Dean finishes for him, smiling, and he can’t see it but he knows Cas is rolling his eyes. “It’s funny but you know, I just don’t care.”

“Really.” Cas’s voice is flat and Dean hears the skepticism. 

He pulls back to meet Cas’s eyes. “Yes, really. Listen, I’m sure I’ve got all sorts of complexes still from the shit he told me, but the thing is, his family was Catholic, and obviously he learned at a young age that being gay, or—” despite everything, it’s still hard for Dean to get it out, “or _bisexual_ , or whatever, was a sin, but.” Dean shrugs. “I mean, I’ve got pretty cold hard proof that the old God didn’t care about sexuality, and the new God certainly doesn’t, and it turns out angels actually are a big fan of sodomy after all.” He gives Cas a particularly lewd wink just to see the annoyed way Cas squints at him in response. 

“Dean,” Cas says.

“I’m serious. All the — you know, repression and whatever other words you want to borrow from Sammy — that’s my own bullshit, and maybe a lot of it comes from him, but all I’m saying is. I don’t care if he knows that I’m with a guy. An angel in a guy shape. If I want to have any kind of relationship with him now, I’m not starting it out by lying about one of the most important things in my life. Well, afterlife.”

Cas is looking at him like Dean hung up the moon for him, and it just makes him feel even more confident in his words. This thing they’ve got? It’s a good thing. Dean doesn’t have a single doubt. “He always wanted me to wind up with a family. Maybe this isn’t what he pictured — and it’s gonna be one hell of a surprise for him, that’s for sure — but I think once the shock wears off he’ll be happy for me. And of course, if he says _anything_ to you out of line, I’m kicking him out.”

“Dean, you don’t have to—”

“Of course I do,” Dean says. “Listen, he can give me whatever shit he wants. I can take it. He’s not allowed to disrespect you.” 

It’s dark out but Cas’s smile is the sun. “You disrespect me all the time,” he says.

“Exactly. I’m allowed to, because you know I love you. No one else is.”

Every time he says it, the words come a little smoother out of his mouth, and it’s worth it for the way Cas lights up even more. Definitely worth it for the way Cas pushes him up against the porch railing, wraps his hands in the front of Dean’s flannel and kisses him like he’s claiming a prize. 

+

So yeah, it’s more complicated than it was in Stepford-heaven, messier than some angel’s idea of what his perfect family scene would look like. 

Dean knows that, despite all his talk, some part of him is dreading what his dad is going to say when he finds out. (He thinks his mom’s maybe going to be less surprised, after what Sam told him about how painfully obvious their—his phrase—“longing stares” were.) His mom probably still can’t bake a pie for shit, and has two separate lifetimes stuck together in her brain, and his dad’s trauma sure as hell isn’t just going away with a wave of the hand, but now they’ve got time to figure it out. 

Dean’s still himself, which means he’s still got a hell of a lot of issues, but he’s got time, too — no apocalypse looming in the background, no desperate need to protect Sam. 

He has time, and he has the people he loves — too many here already, and plenty more that’ll find their way here eventually — and he has Cas, a warm presence at his side. He’s got everything he needs to find his own, perfect, imperfect peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that is it! I figured after the very rough time they had in the first half of the fic they deserved a lot of softness at the end. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who stuck with me in this - I am usually a real canon finale denialist but I wanted to see if I could make sense of it in a way that worked for my own understanding of the characters, especially the line about John being "right down the road" in Dean's heaven, and writing this has helped me make my own kind of peace with the ending. I hope it works for you as well <3


End file.
